


Belledame

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, gratuitous descriptions of sunlight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-08-23 06:14:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8316928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Maleficent can't resist the opportunity to see for herself what has become of the doomed princess these sixteen years.





	1. La Belle Dame Sans Merci

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I met a lady in the meads,   
>  Full beautiful—a faery’s child,   
> Her hair was long, her foot was light,   
>  And her eyes were wild.   
> -John Keats

 

She is beautiful.

She is so lovely that the limbs of the trees themselves seem to bend towards her, reaching to brush her golden hair. She is so lovely that the sunlight falls on her like hot longing tears, that the flowers yearn upwards to be crushed under her feet. When Maleficent discovers her in the forest beyond the borders of the kingdom, the breath goes out of her for a terrible moment. The girl is standing at the bank of a river, black with mud up to her ankles and red up to her knuckles with sweet berries, and in the wake of her all-annihilating loveliness Maleficent feels horrifically mortal. The queen of darkness pulls back deeper into her familiar shadows, watching the girl as barely more than a pair of slitted eyes from the underbrush.

The three meddlers gifted her with beauty in her royal crib, Maleficent is fully aware. She had thought she was prepared for it, but the reality—it is almost too much to bear. The girl has all the grace of a fairy, and all the glittering ephemeral magnetism of a mortal. To a creature of cool fire and storm and darkness like Maleficent, the effect is as devastating as it is exotic.

There is an army waiting for the snap of her fingers, but Maleficent does not call them. This is only a question of beauty, she thinks to herself, and fading mortal beauty at that. It will lose its shimmer quickly, like all baubles do. One merely need handle a sapphire for a moment before losing interest in its repetitive shine.

She dissolves and reforms out of the shadows, making herself the guise of a human woman—a noblewoman perhaps, in rich traveling clothes. She examines her hands, white now, and her skirts, the dim grey of storm clouds. This should do.

“Young lady,” she calls, stepping through the brush and onto the opposite bank, “young lady, could you spare a moment for an unfortunate traveler?”

The girl startles, raspberries tumbling from between her sticky hands. “Oh,” she gasps. Her visible fear both mollifies and puzzles Maleficent. There ought not to be anything fey left in her appearance.

“Young lady,” she says, shifting closer, “are you well?”

“Oh, yes, Madame,” the girl says. Her hands are twisting the handle of her straw basket. “Quite well—thank you. It’s just that—I’m afraid I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Of course, Maleficent thinks sourly. If she had been running around the towns these last sixteen years, it wouldn’t have taken the better part of two decades to locate her.

“Perhaps,” Maleficent says, delicately, “an exception could be made for a humble misfortunate such as myself…?”

The girl bites her lovely pink lip. Her muddy toes push divots into the soft earth. “Of course,” she says. “These woods must be awfully confusing for a gentle lady. And—” she adds, peering up to search the sky, “night is coming soon. You must be very frightened.”

Maleficent bristles against the supposition that anything in these woods might be half as terrible as she. But she _is_ playing a mortal, she remembers just in time. To mortals, nearly everything is fearful.

The girl takes the hem of her skirt and tucks it into her bodice, making a swoop and puff of cloth that bares her dimpled knees, without the slightest apparent concern for who might see them. She sets her basket down on the bank and steps into the water, holding her hands out to Maleficent. The water is clear and fast and shallow, barely lapping over the swell of the girl’s shapely calf.

“What _are_ you doing?” Maleficent asks.

The girl stretches her hands out further, sticky red fingers glinting in the sunlight that breaks down over the bend of the river. “The nearest village is back the way I came from,” she says, “so you’ll need to cross the river.”

It takes perhaps a moment longer than it should for Maleficent to remember that a human woman would not be able to step across the top of the water, which was what she had been just about to do. The girl, noticing her hesitation, smiles encouragingly.

“Your fine clothes shouldn’t be subjected to so much water,” she says. “I’ll carry you across, it’s no trouble.”

“You?” Maleficent says, eyeing the girl’s willowy limbs. This princess is going to carry _her?_

“I think I am stronger than you suspect,” the girl says, with a glint of mischief in her eye. “I carry the flour from the village to the cottage by myself, and I chop the firewood as well. Gentle lady, you might be surprised by what it takes to live alone in these woods.”

“You live alone, do you?” Maleficent says, glancing between the rapid water and the girl’s waiting arms.

“With my three aunts,” she answers easily. “They’re very kind women, but a bit difficult sometimes.”

Maleficent thinks of pearls tumbling from the mouths of peasant women, of golden branches and enchanted slippers. The self-styled mistress of evil, goblin queen, lady of darkness, is not by any means an agent of chaos. There is an order to these thing, between disguised fairies and secret princesses, between acts of kindness and acts of retribution. Aurora’s father invited disaster by snubbing one fairy. With her gentleness, his daughter has invited something else entirely.

Hesitantly, Maleficent takes her hand and allows herself to be pulled into the arms of the princess, who hefts her with a soft grunt and then grins. It is very strange. Maleficent swings her own, now sticky, hand around the back of the girl’s neck and grasps her shoulder, feeling small and delicate in a way she never expected to. Her traveling cloak trails the water below them, along with one corner of Aurora's skirt that has come loose from the bodice, leaving a tracery of ripples in its wake.

No one has ever dared to hold the lady of darkness like this before. It would be laughable. She is not the kind of fairy that goes genteelly hawking with a retinue of ladies, or dances in lavish halls deep into the night. She is not that kind of fairy at all. But the powerful arms underneath her carry a soft echo of what it might be like to leave her staff in the tower of her castle and come down to a world of easy smiles and gentle comforts. All of that perfumed world is held inside of this girl, who chops firewood and carries flour and wades into rivers with her skirts around her thighs.

The water splashes around them. The girl slides carefully through it, and although Maleficent is braced for her to stumble, she never does.

“See?” the girl says, “Nothing to fear.”

Maleficent looks up into her heart-shaped face, watches the quirk of her elegant dark brows. The sun seems dim in comparison, as if it is setting just to make room in the sky for her.

At last they arrive at the far side. The girl kneels on the embankment and allows Maleficent to climb free, steadying one hand on the surprisingly sturdy shoulder. She takes up her basket again and seems to be looking Maleficent over, lips pursed. She reaches out and pinches the corners of Maleficent’s wimple, tugging it just so.

“There,” she says, setting her hands on her hips. It seems a strangely maternal gesture, for someone who has never known her own mother.

“Thank you,” says Maleficent, who is too much a fairy to let a selfless deed go unremarked upon. “One good turn deserves another, I suppose. Is there anything I can do for you, my girl?”

“Briar, please,” the girl says, dipping into a curtsy that would no doubt look more graceful with the remaining folds of her skirt unbunched. “Briar Rose.”

If Maleficent didn’t already know her birth name, she would be a bit miffed. Trust those goody goodies to outfit the girl with the protection of a false name. As it is, she still finds herself displeased at the revelation. Had they even _told_ the girl what her Christian name had been? To deny a creature the knowledge of its own name was a cruel thing. Even the birds and the stones knew their names. Maleficent is herself no stranger to all manner of cruelties, but this one—it sits heavily on her, unreasonably distressing.

“You needn’t give me anything, Madame,” Briar Rose says, as she untucks the wet hems of her skirt.

“But you must want something,” Maleficent insists, catching the girl’s chin with one finger. “It matters not what. Gold? Jewels? A handsome young man to be yours?”

All things, of course, which could easily be made hers with the simple revelation of a lineage kept overlong. It benefitted Maleficent well enough to send her home to her impotent parents.

Briar Rose turns a shade of red that manages to look as endearing as it does silly, as she tucks her head into the shawl at her cheek. “A young man? My aunts would never allow that,” she says, but with a wistfulness that belies some secret dreams.

Something curls in Maleficent’s belly, like a serpent in the seas. The princess and her dashing knight, her long awaited betrothed—the idea sours everything it touches.

“Riches, then,” Maleficent says, glad to leave the prospect of husbands behind. “Lovely dresses? Golden rings?”

Briar Rose laughs. “Oh no,” she says, “what would I do with those? I have enough to get by.”

Maleficent brushes dust from her silk sleeves, her lips thinner even than usual. “What then?” she says. The longer she stands here, talking with the girl, the more heavily the future weighs on her. There is a spindle in the castle still, bricked up behind a forgotten wall. It is the last spindle in the kingdom. With every second that passes, the spindle grows sharper in her mind.

Briar Rose plucks a berry from her basket and offers it to her companion, another unasked gesture of kindness. Humans who eat fruit from a fairy’s hand are doomed to serve fairy until the Day of Judgment. Maleficent regards the thing in the girl’s hand, and wonders if fairies who eat the fruit of a human’s hand are likewise entrapped.

She accepts the berry and crushes it between her teeth, popping the multitude of tiny seeds concealed there. It is not as sweet as the fruit of her homeland, but the clear pleasure on Briar Rose’s face as she swallows it fills Maleficent with all the heat and ripeness of fruits picked underneath a never-setting sun.

“I guess what I would like,” Briar Rose says, licking her fingertips, “is for you to tell me your name.”

All at once, cold rage sweeps through Maleficent. Has she been taken for a _fool_ by this fragile mortal insect? Had the girl known the whole time what manner of woman she was carrying? What else could she mean but to discover the most carefully kept secret of a fairy’s life?

The girl’s eyes fly wide open, her heel skating back over the leaves of the forest floor. “Oh, Madame,” she says, “I don’t mean any disrespect by it! Of course you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I only meant to—I had hoped I might call you a friend.” She pulls her shawl tighter around herself, eyes fixed on the ground. “If I’ve upset you, please, think no more of it. I’ve never—I’ve never had a friend before, I must be ignorant.”

Slowly, the cold fire in Maleficent’s chest dies down to ash and collapses. No, she couldn’t have known what she was asking. If she had known what she was talking to, she would never have remained at the river. She would have run. Surely her _aunts_ must have warned her as much.

“No,” the fairy says, after a moment, “I offered you whatever your heart desired. If you would like to know my name, I can provide it easily enough.”

Briar Rose sags, relief plain on her features.

“I have a secret name,” Maleficent tells her, “and I have a common name. One you may call me by, the other you must never speak. Do you understand?”

The girl nods. She’s leaning closer, coming up off her heels in her eagerness to hear.

The forest seems to hold its breath. Maleficent steps forward and cups the curve of the girl’s jaw in one hand, bringing her lips down to the pink shell of an ear. She can almost smell the heat that comes up off the fragile human flesh, a body which burns its brief life out like a roaring fire.

She whispers one name, and then the other. Briar Rose sighs gently at the sound.

“Maleficent,” she says, her eyes bright. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

The brightness of her eyes, the perfect earnestness of her voice—Maleficent has never experienced anything quite like the confluence of sensations that make up Briar Rose. She has spent the last fifteen years brooding in the stormy tower of her castle, thinking of little else but the indignity king Stephan had done her. In the span of less than an hour, she has experienced more disparate emotions than nearly two decades previously have afforded her.

“Will you walk with me?” Briar Rose asks her. “It is getting late, and it’s such a long way. You could be much more lost than you are even now.”

If there was a point to this venture—perhaps to prove what a disposable pawn the lost princess was, against the greater scheme of Maleficent’s wounded pride—it has long been lost in the tumult of the girl’s unexpected kindness. There is no point in trudging through these woods like a dreary mortal. It could only serve to further muddle Maleficent’s mind.

“Don’t you need to be going home?” she asks .

“I can still make it back by dark, if I lead you to the road. My aunts say the roads can be dangerous for a woman alone, but I’ve never had any trouble with them, so I don’t see why you would.”

“If you insist,” Maleficent says, not quite understanding why she says it.

Briar Rose takes her hand, naively ignorant of the proper respect owed by an apparent peasant woman to an apparent noble woman, and leads her down the grassy path. Of course they are both royalty in their own ways—this is why Maleficent allows the touch to stand, and nothing else.

“I hope,” Briar Rose says, her fingers squeezing tight, “that you might allow me to call you a friend, after all.”

The bells of the white flowers that grow along the path swing delicately in the wake of their passage. A web of loose golden hair is tangled over the girl’s heavy locks, mussed from the leaves she ducks between, as bright in the sun as a halo. It comes over Maleficent in a slow wave, the realization that the princess’s loveliness is not that of the common sapphire. It is the loveliness of the sun coming over the canopy of the forest, a thing in constant motion, never quite the same one day to another.

And Maleficent realizes how it is that fairies come to covet human beings.


	2. Dame Sans Per

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vous estes le vray saphir  
> Qui puet tous mes maus garir et terminer.  
> (You are the true sapphire  
> that can heal and end all my sufferings.)  
> -Guillaume de Machaut

 

Briar Rose arrives at her aunties’ cottage as the last pale twilight fades from between the branches above. Her feet are sore from the stones of the riverbed hours ago, and the walking ever since, but her heart is like the wind. She could happily have walked until her heels bled. The stern elegance of the Lady Maleficent carries her, as cool as the summer storms that break the oppressive heat of the forest.

At the bottom of her bodice, she's hidden the lady’s favor: a handkerchief, in the silken lavender of heavy clouds, finer than anything Briar has ever seen before. There are no seams, no marks at all except for the embroidery of twin horns at its corner. For leading her to the road, she had said. She called it a trifle, but Briar Rose is certain that she would take it over all the impersonal gold and riches of King Stephan’s castle. This had been her lady’s.

Briar Rose floats into the cottage on her bruised feet, humming to herself. There is a fire to light and dough to knead, and she goes through the familiar motions with her mind still on Maleficent. The house is unusually empty, but not surprisingly so. When her aunts go to the towns to buy anything more complicated than flour and feed, it takes all three of them just to handle one vendor. Briar Rose has seen it in action—it’s the only time in her life she has felt truly embarrassed by the women who raised her. Merryweather loses her temper at the first sign of haggling, and Fauna cries at the very mention of hungry children, regardless of whether the shop keeper has a family or not. Briar Rose has seen enough to know that this is not normal, although she’s never been allowed to speak with a shopkeeper herself.

Her aunts used to take her to the towns when she was too young to stay at home by herself for days at a time. They would all stay in the inn, above the tavern, where the floorboards themselves shook and thrummed with the noise down below. They had gone once or twice a year until she was twelve, at which point she had made the mistake of speaking with a stable hand when she should have been waiting silently in the room, and that had been the end of that. She could still remember everything the boy had said to her—a treatise on the nature of horses, complaints about the innkeeper’s wife, an unnecessary but charming warning about the dangers of the forest—topics that had distressed her aunts for months afterward. Sometimes it seemed that Briar Rose could go neither left nor right without distressing someone. The boy himself had been confused and unhappy to hear the details of her own life.

Sighing, Briar Rose tugs the favor from her breast, running her thumb over the miniscule stitches on the horned emblem. _Maleficent_ hadn’t found her distressing.

If only she wasn’t _such_ a fine lady. If only she didn’t live so far away, no doubt with her servants and gardens and endless stables. If only Briar Rose could see her again.

 

 

Maleficent stalks the halls of her castle in gales of fluttering silks and wreaths of green flame. Lightning, always conscientious of its mistress's moods, obliges to crack outside the windows. Everything is rotten, the feasts and her lieutenants and the stone stairwell itself. Everything chafes at her from the inside out.

“M'lady,” one of her goblins says, hovering nervously at the end of the courtyard. He’s a pigsnouted thing, a captain of the guard. An idiot, but a loyal idiot.

“ _What_ ,” she snaps, stalking past him and into the open expanse of her gardens.

The captain trails after her, through the hulking curls of thorned vines, skirting the blood-black blossoms of carnivorous flowers. “M'lady,” he says again, “you smote the head of the kitchen this morning. Did you, er, have a replacement in mind?”

Maleficent slaps the ball of her staff into her open palm, watching the diminutive creature quake in fear. “No,” she says.

“Right you are, my lady,” her captain says, quickly, “I’ll just, I’ll tell them to promote the apprentice—”

“Captain,” Maleficent says. She plucks the violet bloom from a waist-high patch of briars, balancing it gently on the tip of one finger. “Do you feel that some portion of the last decade has been wasted, searching for the girl?”

“Uh,” her captain says, sweating now, “nope! No ma’am, I do not at all feel that we could have been up to much better thievery and trouble-making if we hadn’t been out busy turning over cradles, ma’am.”

“Really,” Maleficent says, “because I do.”

Goblins are simple creatures. She hesitates to call what she has here an army of any kind, because an actual army would have figured out to start searching for toddlers about fourteen years ago, but they are her men regardless.

She has been the Goblin Queen since long before King Stephan’s distant progenitor ever lifted his pike against a Roman legionnaire. The twilight land of her home is far behind her, no doubt just as it ever was even in her absence, with its morbid halls host to the dead and dying and its endless balls and feasts. She has never regretted leaving. In that sunless world beneath the earth, nothing ever changes. There are no seasons, there are no deaths or births, and there are no places for ambitious minds to rise to. She had thought that carving out her territory here atop the mortal lands, among the exiles, would change that. But she has spent fifteen years in her tower, brooding, in her own perpetual twilight.

The bloom on her finger shivers, and twirls away into the gloom of the garden. And then in the course of one evening, she had lived what felt like a lifetime.

“Captain,” she says. “How long until the girl’s sixteenth birthday?”

The goblin counts on his fingers, restarting a couple of times. He makes a noise like a house being ripped apart by the beams. Maleficent sneers at the effort and takes her leave entirely, abandoning him to the faint mercies of the garden. She knows how long it will be. She has a month before the girl will need to be returned to the castle of her birth, to receive the fated pinprick. She has a month to discover what it is that breeds such desire that the lady of darkness cannot walk through her own garden without wondering whether a human child would approve of its flowers.

 

 

Maleficent arrives in the clearing of Briar Rose’s cottage on the back of one of her hounds, enchanted to look no more remarkable than a common destrier. There’s none of the shouting and pandemonium she expected to find in a house holding both Flora and Merryweather, only the sounds of birds as they take to the air. They know better than humans when a monster walks beneath their branches.

“Briar Rose,” she calls out, the reins of her mount jangling with each of its heavy steps. “Briar Rose, come out and greet your lady.”

Through the half-open door, there is a thump, as if a chair has been toppled. Briar Rose appears above the closed half, her breast heaving with surprise. During the second that her eyes search for the source of the summons, Maleficent barely dares to breathe. And then the girl throws herself over the door, vaulting it in one swift movement, stumbling across the grass to the foot of Maleficent’s mount.

“Madame—” she says, reaching up fearlessly to steady herself against the broad neck of the hound. It doesn’t seem to know what to think of this development any more than its mistress. “Oh, Madame, I thought you would be long gone by now! Where is your traveling party?”

“They went onwards on the pilgrimage without me,” Maleficent replies, dismissing the question with a flick, “I shall simply have to wait for them to return.”

“How unkind of them,” Briar Rose says, with a frown of concern. She strokes the flank of the beast absently, brushing against the jangle of its reigns. “I’m sure your husband will miss you.”

“ _Husband_ ,” Maleficent snorts. “I think not.”

The girl looks up sharply, her eyes wide. “You don’t have a husband?”

“Gracious no,” Maleficent says. “What are they good for but taking credit for the work of their wives?”

“I’ve never met a woman who wasn’t married,” Briar Rose murmurs. “I didn’t know you could just… not.”

Maleficent throws the reigns over the side of her mount’s neck and extends a hand. Briar Rose hurries to take it, effortlessly catching the fairy around her waist and lifting her from her seat. Even through the boning of the corset, her hand is warm and solid. She has such delicate fingers, despite the work she does, despite her strength.

“What of your aunts?” Maleficent asks, trying to imagine a mortal man who could keep up with the three most relentless busy bodies on this or any other plane of existence.

“Oh,” Briar Rose says. She seems stumped, still holding Maleficent’s waist although both their feet have firmly met the ground. “I suppose… I’ve never heard any of them mention husbands. Forgive me, sometimes I forget that they are women—they seem so unlike the wives in the towns, sometimes I wonder where they came from.”

“They haven’t told you?”

Briar Rose shakes her head. She is holding Maleficent in the way of a dancer, unashamed at the lingering clasp of their hands. “They say somewhere far away,” she answers, “but nothing else. I don’t even know who my parents were. Fauna starts crying when I mention it, so I don’t mention it anymore.”

“You didn’t miss much,” Maleficent murmurs. She extracts herself from the girl’s grasp, her waist feeling abruptly cold with the loss of the touch. “Where _are_ your aunts?”

“They’ve gone to the towns,” Briar Rose replies, “to collect the cloth for the mill. They won’t be back for another week, I don’t think.” She pauses, her eyes faraway for a moment, and then she rushes forward, catching Maleficent’s hands between her own. She says, “You could stay here! It would be much better than staying in an inn—my aunts say they’re terribly dangerous, and expensive besides.”

Maleficent is stiff in her grip, barely checking the impulse to throw the girl off and summon her staff. Clearly she meant no harm, but the last time someone came at the fairy queen like that, there had been blood.

“It’s only a humble cottage,” Briar Rose says, turning that familiar shade of red, “I’m sure you’re used to finer things, but it would be so nice to have company for a while. The animals are darling, but they haven’t got the gift of conversation, you see.”

Maleficent is surprised to find herself intrigued. She has never desired to live like a mortal before, but after the last afternoon she spent in Briar Rose’s company—

“I suppose,” she says, slowly. “If you have a bed to spare…”

The goblins will carry on without her supervision as they always do—they are largely self sufficient, although they pester her a bit when she’d gone too long without a good smiting or an execution. Goblins largely believe that the purpose of royalty is to provide structured violence and a bit of character-building bloodshed. They could hardly muck up much of importance in the space of a week or two.

Briar Rose lets out a gale of excited laughter, pulling Maleficent away from her beast and towards the cottage. In the vegetable garden the slender stems of sweet peas spread towards the sky, and the mill click-click-clicks under the pressure of the river, and Maleficent can’t remember the last time she ran after anyone.

The girl shows her the upstairs room, where her own bed lays neatly over the floor, and insists that Maleficent take it for the remainder of her stay. She runs her hands over the limb of the tree that grows through her floor, shows her the sewing projects that hang on the window, fluffs her one pillow over and over again as if she can will more stuffing into it. The day passes in a whirl of energy, as Briar Rose remembers one thing after another to show her guest. Maleficent learns that the meddlers earn their mortal living by fulling cloth for merchants in the nearby towns, and that although Briar Rose knows everything about the business by now, she has never been allowed to speak with the merchants.

By evening, the girl has wearied herself with excitement, so they rest at the edge of the stream in the coming darkness. Late summer fireflies hang glittering in the bushes like the fairy lights of Maleficent’s homeland. One glowing speck rests on Briar Rose’s knee, as she dips her toes in the water. She is singing quietly, watching the lights come and go.

“ _Vous vueil jusques au morir,”_ she sings, “ _dame sans per_ …”

Maleficent watches her. Even in the perfect calm of the evening, things are happening. Each word that tumbles from the girl’s lips, like enchanted pearls, changes the pitch and hum of the queen’s stone heart.

“Where did you hear that?” Maleficent asks her. She is perched on a stone that rises from the bank of the stream, her skirts arranged underneath her.

“There was a troubadour in the tavern,” the girl replies, her eyes on the star-pocked sky, “who used to sing the new songs from Paris. I learned them all through the floorboards.”

In her homeland there had always been music. One human conquest after another, to play new songs for the gentry that they could not play for themselves. Music was a notoriously human endeavor, a precious thing that no magic could seem to recreate. Maleficent remembers how the courtiers doted on their collection of mortal musicians, feeding them the choicest tidbits and kissing their blistered fingers, weeping when they grew grey and fell down cold at the bows of their fiddles. Maleficent had been too busy with her own ambitions to waste her time dallying with them.

 _“Oubeir,”_ Briar Rose sings. “ _Doubter, servir, et honnourer-_ ”

To obey you until my death, to fear and serve you, my peerless lady…

Maleficent burns hotter and hotter with the promise of the poem. She imagines a throne room, the girl’s shapely knees against the flagstones as she says _obey, fear_ , _serve_ —

“Do you think gems can actually cure illness?” Briar Rose asks. She half hums, “ _Vous estes le vray saphir_ ,” losing the thread of her own song.

“Not common sapphire,” Maleficent responds, only half listening. She is still thinking of the throne room, the girl looking up at her with her bright eyes full of desire, and her lips forming the roundness of _obey_.

“Do you know any songs?” Briar Rose asks, her shoulder leaning briefly against the fairy queen’s calf.

“No,” Maleficent says. Her skin crackles like a lightning storm where the girl briefly pressed it. “No, where I come from, no one knows any songs.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Briar Rose says. She clasps Maleficent’s ankle, like a supplicant, and for the bursting hotness of one moment Maleficent cannot tell where her fantasy ends and reality begins. But the girl’s eyes are full of pity and distress, not desire, and the ankle she grasps is a pale white one. “What a terrible place,” she says. “I couldn’t live like that. I think even if I had never met another human being, I would still have learned it from the birds.”

You were blessed in your cradle with the gift of song, Maleficent thinks; you could have learned it from the stones if that was all you’d had.

“Here,” the girl says, climbing to her feet. “Let me teach you one. Then you can take it back to your home, and teach it to them.”

For an odd moment, Maleficent imagines teaching one of the princess’s songs to her goblins. The idea is so laughable that all she can do is watch helplessly as the girl pulls her to her feet.

“What would you like to learn?” the girl asks her. “A love song? Those are my favorites.”

Maleficent glances uneasily at the edges of the clearing, searching for the clumsy outlines of goblins in the underbrush. It is coming to her all at once what she must look like, a dark queen lingering in the forest like a lovestruck vagabond, with the child of her most hated political enemy. And yet she can’t bring herself to forfeit this strange challenge.

“Perhaps,” she says, “a song of your own?”

Briar Rose is thoughtful for a while, absently brushing fireflies from her hair, and then she smiles. There’s a flash of mischief there, again, in the wrinkle of her nose. “For this one,” she says, “you’ll have to dance.”

She holds her hands out. Maleficent half expected to be dragged into the steps without pause, but Briar Rose only holds her hands out, waiting to be held. Maleficent’s hands almost shake as she wraps them around the girl’s waist and fingers, pulling her close. She has never felt herself to be so much a queen as she does now, as if the gift of the lead in this dance were a more powerful coronation rite than any ever witnessed before.

“ _I… know… you_ ,” the girl begins, sliding her fingers between the fairy queen’s. “ _I walked with you once… upon… a dream…_ ”

The steps come back to Maleficent as if she had never left the soaring halls of her birthplace, a place that she has not missed until this very moment. Round they go, over the grass and the broad leaves, and Briar Rose follows without question, through the strangest steps and the deepest dips, trusting perfectly that Maleficent will catch her. No one has ever trusted the fairy queen like this before, not her largely self-sufficient subjects or her long forgotten courtiers, and certainly no delicate fast-burning mortal.

“ _You’ll love me at once_ ,” Briar Rose sings, “ _the way you did once_ …”

The fireflies seem as enchanted by it as the girl’s dance partner. They rise from the grass, circling—they also must long to be close to her, to have her gaze pour heavy over them, as dangerous as sweetwater in the lungs.

In the wake of a twirl, Briar Rose falls silent against Maleficent’s chest. Her hand presses above the heart, hard over the giving flesh. “Now you,” she says, breathless. “Your turn.”

Maleficent says nothing. She feels foolish, and exalted, and confused by it all.

“It’s alright,” Briar Rose says. “Look, I’ll sing with you. Then you’ll see how simple it is.”

It doesn’t befit a lady of her station, singing peasant songs barefoot in a field, but she’s come this far. It is either oblige the girl or end this moment altogether, and she finds that she cannot bear the prospect of parting so soon.

“I…” Maleficent starts, and then coughs uncertainly, turning her head to avoid the girl’s unwavering gaze.

“ _I_ ,” Briar Rose sings, holding the note in her clear perfect voice.

“ _I_ ,” Maleficent echoes, “ _know you_ … _I walked with you once_ …”

The girl’s voice is a steady bridge, a slender tower, supporting Maleficent as she climbs the notes with a throat that feels altogether foreign. Her own voice is unfamiliar to her, much deeper than the girl’s, shakily racing after the sounds that stretch beyond her comfort. Singing, she discovers, is not unlike dancing. It is difficult at first but, once you know the steps, not impossible. And Briar Rose leads her gently through it, as they circle aimlessly through the grass.

Her heels meet the earth. More than anything she wants to wear her own skin, her own body, tonight, without collapsing the fragile bubble of this moment with her monstrous appearance. She wants to hold the girl with her own arms, to wrap her up in the rich weight of her customary robes, and to be looked at with that same naked adoration.

Maleficent finds the last note all on her own, holding it steady and stronger than any before it as Briar Rose climbs down from a harmony to meet her there, on that final adieu. Lights glitter in the silence that follows. The heartbeat that thumps in the girl’s wrist is so fast.

“I had always thought,” she says, “I’d sing that someday with the man I was to marry. I thought—maybe, we’d dance, and he would kiss me at the end.”

Maleficent is frozen to the earth.

“Could I—” says Briar Rose, “could I kiss you, Madame?”

There is a spinning wheel in the forgotten attic of King Stephan’s castle. It is preternaturally sharp, its spindle untouched by the passage of the years. It is the only thing on this earth that hungers more for the touch of this girl than Maleficent herself.

“If you must,” says the mistress of all evil.

 


	3. Hungry Thirsty Roots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> here there be underage sex. If you don't want to read it, you can stop reading at the third "destitute" and you won't see any of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never mind my bruises,  
> Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices  
> Squeez'd from goblin fruits for you,  
> Goblin pulp and goblin dew.  
> -Christina Rosetti

Briar Rose seems to want to know about everything. Any monarch understands that knowledge is power, fairy or not, but the girl is as interested in political alliances as she is in the color of the ocean. She seems willing to talk about anything as long as Maleficent is the one talking.

“Do you hope to travel?” Maleficent asks her, leaning over the window sill as Briar Rose tightens a bolt on the water mill outside.

“My aunties wouldn’t let me,” the girl answers, brushing back a strand of golden hair that escaped her kerchief. “The roads are too dangerous. And I’m not to talk to strangers.”

Maleficent scowls. “They certainly are a bunch of overprotective hens.”

“They mean well,” Briar Rose says, with a charitableness worn thin, “after all, cities _are_ dangerous. Illness comes from the city, you know. And there’s all sorts of thieves and cutpurses—I remember once a boy tried to steal from Flora in the middle of the street, it was terrible. I’ve never seen another boy cry like that.”

“You won’t be fifteen forever,” Maleficent points out, resting her chin on her thumb and forefinger. “Perhaps when you’re older. Wouldn’t you like to live by the ocean? In Paris? Perhaps a villa in the countryside.”

“Oh, Madame,” Briar Rose laughs, “this is my home! I don’t see why I’d want to live anywhere else.”

“You could marry rich,” Maleficent pushes, narrowing her eyes. “A nice merchant, perhaps, or a knight. You could live in a beautiful house full of silks and glass, you are certainly lovely enough. Even a king would count himself lucky to wed you.”

Briar Rose ducks closer to her work, cheeks red and splotchy with something between pleasure and embarrassment. “Someday,” she says, “I’ll inherit this mill, and I will go to town and sell cloth for two pennies more than Flora sells it, and talk to anybody I like while I’m there.”

“That’s all?”

Briar Rose returns her tool to her basket, wiping beads of sweat from her forehead. “Well,” she says. “Of course my true love will be there, and we’ll be married, and maybe have a daughter…”

She shoots Maleficent a sideways look that the queen finds difficult to interpret, something verging on sly, as she picks up her basket and moves to the next bolt.

“Your true love,” Maleficent echoes, doubtfully. True love is a magically potent force, by all traditional reckoning, but Maleficent has always been skeptical. She has seen mortals live and die, second and third marriages, marriages of convenience and chivalrous pining turned disastrous love affair, and she has never once seen anything that resembles True Love. She imagines the baby princess’s betrothed, dumbly wandering the forests in search of his promised wife. Perhaps he has been true thus far, but what has he been true to? A specter of a woman he’s never seen? Foolish.

“Of course,” Briar Rose says. “Fauna says that true love is the most powerful force on earth.” The girl sighs, softly, her cranks against the bolt faltering, as she adds, “True love can move mountains.”

“You haven’t even _seen_ a mountain,” Maleficent replies, lip curling.

The girl’s smile dies, and she fixes her attention firmly on the work ahead of her. “That’s not true,” she says. “You can see one from Bethel.”

Maleficent realizes that she had not fully appreciated the frequent little glances from the girl until they were altogether gone. She almost wishes she hadn’t said anything. She’s said far unkinder things to her men back at the goblins’ keep, but the wounded way that Briar Rose holds herself uneases Maleficent. Makes her restless.

“Perhaps,” she offers, “when you inherit the mill, you can take your sales as far as the mountains.”

Briar Rose pauses, and then she turns to smile over her shoulder, the shape of her lips so sweet that Maleficent can almost taste them. The air itself seems to sigh in relief.

“What’s it like living in a castle?” the girl asks her, returning more easily to her work.

Maleficent thinks of the kingdom of her birth, and King Stephan’s castle, and the goblins’ keep. There are varying levels of palaces. “Some,” she says, “are luxurious and bright, and every surface is covered with cushions and tapestries. Others are dark and stout and cold even in the summer.”

“What is yours like?”

The dark thorny flowers rise in her memory. “I have a garden,” she says, “with all sorts of strange plants. It can be cold and dark, but I like it that way.”

“How did you come to live there?” asks Briar Rose, eagerly.

“I thought you had no interest in such things,” Maleficent replies, sidestepping the question.

“Well—not usually but—it’s where _you_ live, isn’t it?”

Inside the cage of Maleficent’s ribs, there is a soaring pressure like the thickness of clouds before the storm breaks above the earth. It is exquisite and unbearable.

 

 

The earth is full of dew, gathered on the pillowing clover leaves, dripping down the long throats of grass; the last lazy breaths of the night. Briar Rose sits in the grass, but she’s insisted on laying down a cloth below Maleficent to protect her from the damp. So many things about Briar Rose unease the fairy queen—seeing a princess nestle herself into the chill cushion of the earth without a second thought makes her question everything she knows about propriety and order. Although the girl doesn’t know it, she is easily as royal as Maleficent who, the very brave and foolhardy might venture to say, was not born to her station in the usual manner of monarchs. The princess, who was born as royal as the stars in the sky, kneels in the grass behind Maleficent, who became a queen of exiles by baring her teeth and digging in her nails. The ground doesn’t split at this scandal. The sky doesn’t open. There are only the drops of clear morning water tracing the height of Briar Rose’s folded ankles.

The girl runs her fingers through Maleficent’s hair, unknotted from its conservative ties, her short nails leaving tingling trails over the scalp. She weaves wildflowers through the forming braids, as Maleficent stares straight ahead, fingers clenched tightly through the folds of her skirt to keep from reacting to the gentle touch.

When she was young, in the land of her birth, she had a handmaiden who braided her hair like this—she remembers tiny buttons, clever fingers, warm skin—but in those days there had always been some next appointment, some pressing piece of gossip. She had never simply sat in this silent intimacy and allowed her heart to grow frenzied under the deluge of touches.

“Who was she,” Briar Rose asks, “your maid?”

Maleficent has been answering certain personal queries, under the logic that Briar Rose's questions are relentless and unavoidable, and it is best to answer some to draw attention from others. The more she talks, the more she realizes how very little she need change to make herself seem an ordinary mortal. Never in her life has she allowed herself to entertain the idea that she might have anything in common with the humans that labor on beyond her castle walls.

“The daughter of a cook,” Maleficent replies. She has to measure her words carefully for fear that a sigh will sneak past her lips.

“What was she like?”

Maleficent frowns. What an odd question—she was a maiden in waiting, one of a hundred interchangeable female faces, a set of hands, a job title and a series of tasks. But somehow, what Maleficent finds herself saying is: “She smelled of citrus. When I walk through the groves in winter, sometimes I think of her.”

Briar Rose lets out a sweet breath, one of her romantic sighs. “What happened to her?”

All at once, Maleficent remembers the maid’s pale face, as round and white as the moon, leaking tears from her red red eyes the only sign of life in her severe expression. “There was a banquet,” Maleficent recalls, “there was a visiting prince. Hrimceald stepped in front of him on her way to the feasting table. She had never paid much attention to my suitors. I often wondered if she truly didn’t see him, as she said, or if perhaps she found him beneath her notice…”

“I don’t understand. What happened?”

“She was dismissed,” Maleficent says, gaze fixed on the yet-dim skyline. “I suppose a girl raised in the country wouldn’t know, but there is a ruthless order to things within the walls of a palace. One must never step out of one’s place. Hrimceald did the prince a terrible blow, insulting him like that.”

“She was _dismissed?”_ Briar Rose says, her hands stilling entirely. “For such a little thing?”

“There was talk that the prince and I might marry,” Maleficent says. It was such a long time ago, but each moment comes back to her now like an image in glass, as distorted as it is tangible. “I was responsible for her. What else could be done?”

“You could have forgiven her,” Briar Rose says. “You could have talked to the prince. Surely if he intended to marry you—”

“ _Weakness_ ,” Maleficent snarls, “weakness. He would have cast me aside without a second glance.”

“But you lost such a friend,” the girl says, her hands tightening in the fall of hair. “For nothing.”

Maleficent holds herself perfectly upright, so tightly that she fears she may begin to shake. How could a common girl, a human girl, ever dare to presume? What could she know of the dire sacrifices Maleficent has made? “For my dignity," Maleficent says, "For my reputation in the court, the standing of my name, the honor of my _household,_ for the sake of the only currency that has ever mattered to anyone with currency to their name! Yes, for nothing!”

“But what about charity,” the girl says, softly. “What about kindness?”

Maleficent clenches her teeth tight against each other. “What use is charity?” she says. “Charity doesn’t sway gossips or secure alliances, charity doesn’t build you a home to live in or guard your windows at night.”

“Charity is its own reward,” Briar Rose says. “When you are kind to the world, the world is kind to you.”

Maleficent laughs. It wrenches itself out of her throat and gushes free like sickness, until she has to tip her head back to make room for it all. Ravens burst from the black skyline. The girl at her back pulls away with a sharp intake of breath. Kindness, yes, kindness, Fauna’s wet-eyed dottering kindness, alive and whole inside the child she raised. Kindness.

Some time ago, decades of some amount, Maleficent had walked through Fauna’s green bright garden with the touch of winter on her cloak, killing everything she touched. Fauna had invited her to see the plants, their delicate young leaves unfurling under her protection while their cousins beyond the walls of the garden withered under hoarfrost. Pity, or kindness, or any of a host of tender bleeding emotions—Fauna was all one great tender bleeding thing. Maleficent only remembers the hot ball of revulsion in her throat as she watched Fauna stoop to stroke their fragile leaves.

Fauna had been the last of them to understand that although Maleficent had turned her back on fairy courts, lived in the mortal realm as they did, they were neither comrades nor allies.

“Show weakness,” Maleficent says, her voice ragged with laughter, “and they will eat you alive.”

And soon, she thinks, you will hate and fear me the same as your guardians. All things return at last to their natural order. Even Fauna, tender bleeding oddity, eventually learned not to search for sympathy in the Lady of Darkness.

Briar Rose is silent for a long moment, and then she pulls herself closer, resting her cheek on the fall of dark hair down Maleficent’s back. “You must have been very lonely there,” she says. “Palaces don’t sound at all like the songs make them out to be.”

Another laugh breaks in Maleficent’s throat. This damn child just won’t make things easy. Her kindness is cruelty, her sweetness is poison.

“You’ll learn,” the fairy says, barely louder than a breath.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. It was nothing. Go on and finish your braid.”

Briar Rose returns to her task, more gently now even than before. The flowers are from the meadow, white as stars and hung on delicate drooping stems. She finishes up the last tie, tugging it tight, and then rises from the grass with only the softest sound of shifting skirts. She circles, coming to stand between Maleficent and the pale blue skyline, shadowy against the growing light. Her hands are cool as she leans down and takes the fairy queen by her face.

“Oh,” she says, voice faltering, “the flowers are all withered. I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize...”

Maleficent reaches up, plucks a bloom from over her ear. The petals have closed in on themselves, wrinkled like the translucent skin of an old maid, stems so dark they almost look black. In her hand, it seems to curl tighter on itself like a frightened animal.

Briar Rose is biting her lip. “I can put in new ones—”

Maleficent takes the loose blossom and tucks it into the girl’s headband. She watches it unfold bit by bit, as if the gold of the radiant hair was the sun itself. “No,” she says. “These will do.”

 

 

Maleficent wakes up in the cottage of the princess she cursed at birth. Every morning Briar Rose coaxes the fairy down from her room and out into the light of day, where some new infinitude of chores awaits. Maleficent accompanies her deep into the forest as she forages, digging up slender tubers and fat mushrooms with her muddy but delicate fingers. She accompanies her to the river, to check fish traps, and into the cellar, to change the fabric in the fulling barrels.

Their meals are simple but plentiful, nearly spilling over ceramic plates as Briar Rose carefully arranges them. She tries so hard to make them pretty enough for a noblewoman that Maleficent hasn’t the heart to turn them down, but as pretty as they are, they are only mortal fruits. Maleficent grows hungry. Compared to most of her kind, she is nearly an ascetic, and still the thinness of human food slowly wears at her.

“Madame,” the girl says, one night, after the plates have been cleared away. “If it isn’t too presumptuous of me, you don’t seem to be well these last couple of days.”

She lays a fluttering hand on the fairy queen’s shoulder. Her hands are so hot, furnace hot, and Maleficent lets out a breathy sound as she leans into the touch.

“Nonsense,” she answers. “I am the picture of health.”

“It’s only that you move more slowly,” Briar Rose says, her hand tightening with a flicker of worry. “And you seem further away from me. Please, Madame, if there is something you need—”

Maleficent draws quickly away. “I am _fine_ ,” she says. “If there is anything I need I can certainly provide it for myself.”

The girl’s hand hovers in the air in front of her, and then she slowly brings it back against her chest, fingers curling closed. For a moment there is silence. Maleficent is watching her hand, resolutely straying no higher, but from the way the girl’s body curls into itself it isn’t hard to imagine what her expression looks like. At last, she says, “Madame, you must let me help you.”

“I _must_ do nothing,” Maleficent answers, sharply. 

When she first arrived in this ridiculous cottage, the mere barbed reminder of their apparent distance in station would have been enough to end this conversation. Now, Briar Rose only closes one fist around the other and steps forward.

“If anything were to befall you,” she says, “Madame, I would be distraught—”

Maleficent reaches up and snatches her down, to kneel beside the chair. She takes the girl’s chin in her hand, watching the tremble of her lips. Stars and stones, she _is_ hungry, but she is more than hungry. There is a desire that surpasses hunger, and it roars to life with the feeling of Briar Rose’s soft skin against her fingers.

“You’d be distraught, would you?” Maleficent remarks.

Urgently, Briar Rose nods. “I would be,” she says, “destitute. I would be heartbroken.”

“Destitute,” Maleficent echoes. When Briar Rose says it, it sounds like the ripping and snatching of heart flesh itself—the way it catches in her throat, the way she surges forward with the word. She is so sweet that she rivals the heavy darkness of fairy fruits. Maleficent traces the point of a nail down her neck, watching the shiver that spreads from it.

“Destitute,” Briar Rose breathes.

Maleficent rises from her chair, watching Briar Rose sitting in the midst of her skirts, trembling with something that is not fear. A fairy queen knows fear. A finger beneath the girl’s chin still, Maleficent guides her up from the floor and into the handsome wooden chair. The hunger at the sight of her pale chest rising and falling threatens to overwhelm, at the sight of her hands clutching the arms of her seat. Maleficent gives into her weakness, the fatigue that makes her limbs want to shake, and sits at the girl’s feet. She takes a knee in each hand and shoves them apart, reveling in the sound that forces itself out of the girl’s throat.

“Sweet creature,” Maleficent murmurs, as she slides her hands beneath the hem of the girl’s skirts, pushing them up onto her thighs.

“M-my lady,” Briar Rose says, breathless and barely daring to move.

“I’m afraid,” Maleficent says, glancing up with her hands still buried in cloth, “you are a talented cook, but I crave sweeter fruits… Hold these, will you please?”

Maleficent pushes the bunches of skirts up to the girl’s hips, where she takes them, revealing the neat bow of her panties. The knot comes free with a simple tug, the endearingly pretty loops unraveling and falling loose over her thighs. Maleficent runs her nails through the soft curls, golden against her own white skin.

“Madame,” Briar Rose says, “you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t sit on the ground, it’s not befitting a lady—”

Maleficent pushes her thumbs between the lips there, pressing them apart to reveal the delicate pink folds between. The heat against her skin is dizzying, and the softness of that shy flesh mesmerizes her as she drags her thumb over the bud at its center.

“Madame,” the girl says again, “I should be the one to—ah! Gh, goodness.”

What an odd time to stand on ceremony. Now, Maleficent thinks, is not the best time to tell the girl what lineage she hails from, but it _would_ be amusing. Instead, Maleficent buries her face in the scent of heat and salt, nosing the bud of the clitoris until Briar Rose runs out of breath to moan with. She nuzzles at the skin, almost glowing with heat, her cheek against the muscled firmness of thigh.

She kisses the skin. “My pretty,” she says, “my darling creature. Give yourself to me and I will shower you with riches, treasures—” she mouths at the folds deep beneath, “wishes great and small—” she sucks a curve of labia into her mouth, “—your heart’s desire, secrets terrible and sweet—”

Briar Rose gives a shiver and twitches, and with unsteady fingers she takes Maleficent’s face gently in her hands. Her face is flushed but her eyes are bright, sharper than the blade of a sword.

“Take anything you want, my lady,” she says, rubbing absent half circles against Maleficent’s cheekbones, “only promise me none of that. I don’t want it. Take anything you want and call it a gift, freely given.”

Maleficent groans, feeling the snap and sparkle of magic in the air around them. If anything, she wants the girl even more terribly now—but gifts demand recompense somewhere down the line, and she knows she has just done to herself the same awful thing that fairies are famous for doing to mortal men. She will pay for this someday.

She licks down into the hot wet center of Briar Rose, trembling with a desire that destroys everything in its path. She’ll pay for this weakness later. For now, the only thing she knows is the sound of the princess’s voice, fluttering into something as sweet as song.


	4. Our Lady of Sorrows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it probably says something about me that this is my favorite chapter thus far. Written while listening to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVHU_YWV3e4) on repeat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Better a life like a falling star, terrible and bright, than a deathlessness which knows naught beyond itself."  
> -Poul Anderson, "The Broken Sword"

In the glow of the afternoon, the windows flung wide open to catch the breeze, they make bread together. They roll out the dough side by side, forearms covered in flour. Maleficent has seen these same forearms splashed with blood to the elbows, these same fingers glowing fire hot with dark spells. Now she sets her rings in a pile on the kitchen table and rolls dough, watching their two sets of arms fall into a shared rhythm. It’s like singing again—the uncertainty, the smiling encouragement, the triumph of a task completed. The world is still and bright, simple under her kneading fingers.

With her floury forearms and even heartbeat, she feels almost as if she could be the woman Briar Rose thinks she is. Could she roll away the grimy residue of a thousand curses this way? Could she reshape herself, would she want to? The kingdom she rules is a harsh and formidable place, but it is her place, and she has no desire to let go of what she worked so hard to take. It is not possible to be both the lady that Briar Rose thinks she is and also the queen of an exile kingdom, but in the shade with the window open on a golden afternoon, it almost seems so.

“Look,” Briar Rose says, pointing towards the edge of the woods. Sun bright motes drift from her fingers. “Do you see that wolf?”

Maleficent peers through the brightness and spots the shifting darkness under the trees. It looks like an older wolf, grizzled and barely thickened by the summer.

“He comes to check on me every so often,” the girl says. “Sometimes he brings me things. I met him one winter, in the valley over the river.”

Maleficent frowns at the specter. She knows wolves. They aren’t fond of men, or the houses of men.

“He was injured,” Briar Rose says, pressing a red berry into the pale dough. It pops, and disappears into the white. “I kept him here in the house until he was strong enough to leave.”

“Why?” Maleficent says. She is still frowning through the sunlight, brows furrowed. “Wolves eat rabbits and deer. I’ve seen you walking with those things before. Your wolf has probably gone on to eat any number of animal friends you might have.”

Briar Rose pauses, her eyes far away. “I don’t know,” she says. “I saw him in the snow and I just moved. I got him wrapped in my cloak… he was too weak even to bite me…” She holds her arms against her chest, cradling empty air. “Flora said it was foolish. I could have been hurt. I knew that, even as I was carrying him.”

“It _was_ foolish,” Maleficent says. “It’s a waste of effort for a creature that would have eaten you whole if the day had been reversed.”

Briar Rose says nothing for a moment, and then she smiles. “I am foolish, aren’t I?” she says. “And yet, whatever he is, I’m glad that he’s still alive.”

 

 

Maleficent stalks the edges of the clearing, under the canopy of oaks thick as the bars of a cell. Like an idiot, like an arrogant fool, she has gone willingly to the cage that holds her now and locked herself inside. What can be done? She loves the idiot child, the naïve mortal—she would be a greater fool still to deny it now. Her black dress sweeps over the grass, leaving the singed tips wilted in her wake. Maleficent, the girl’s own executioner! In love! It is too much, too much entirely.

That day almost sixteen years ago is as fresh in her mind as the moment she swept out of the grand hall in a flight of flame and laughter. King Stephan, the pompous pillar of piety, aghast with rage and fear; all his shaking nobility; the little princess like a loaf of bread in the shadow of her crib. How was Maleficent to know that she would grow to be a person one day too? Human babes are so damnably interchangeable. If only her saintly father had simply extended the appropriate invitations to the christening, if only he had put his royal duty ahead of his Christianly virtue and opened his doors to the mistress of evil—what a present Maleficent could have made the child, what grave and wonderful gifts she could have bestowed. Instead of death and sleep, a silver tongue? An unbreakable heart?

Maleficent pauses in the middle of her path, billowing sleeves falling slack at her side like empty sails. A world in which Aurora is only one of a thousand uninteresting human maids, unremembered until the day it comes time for her to invite Maleficent to her own child’s christening: the thought fills Maleficent with rivaling relief and heartsickness.

“Confound her,” Maleficent hisses. “Confound _me._ ”

Stephan Stephan _Stephan_ —her rage doubles and fourfolds. It wasn’t enough for him to simply _not_ invite Maleficent, queen of goblins, no, he had to invite those three meddling nobodies instead. The deliberate insult! The gall! His hubris had damned them all.

In seven days, Briar Rose would return to the parents she had never known and the castle with the ever-sharp spinning wheel planted deep in its ancient walls. She would prick her finger, and she would fall into a deep sleep. The spell had been laid so long ago, it would certainly find its way to completion regardless of Maleficent’s personal involvement. So she would sleep, and in her sleep she would be as good as dead, and Maleficent would be free of her skylark voice and her smiling lips at last.

“What else am I to do?” she snaps at the ravens that are flocking one by one at the forest’s edge, watching her pace. “Her betrothed may be _true,_ but he certainly hasn’t had an opportunity to _love_ her. And—” she sucks in a breath, bringing her fingers to her lips, “—and she has no first kiss left to give.”

Maleficent’s heart plummets. “How could I have been so _careless_ ,” she snarls, sweeping all at once back into her harried pacing. The grass blackens and curls away into nothing under her, ghostly fire chewing the hems of her skirts. It was true love’s _first_ kiss that was meant to break the spell, and there is no timely intervention from a handsome lovestruck prince that can fix that. Without even meaning to, Maleficent has secured her revenge at long last.

“Back doors, trap doors,” she mutters, flames lapping at her sleeves, “loopholes, _something!_ ”

The birds caw at her curiously, following her with beady black eyes. They have nothing to contribute. She longs suddenly for the stalwart companionship of Diaval, but he is back at the keep minding her affairs like the dutiful lieutenant he is. And besides, she wouldn’t be able to bear the embarrassment of what she’s done under his scrutiny. What kind of mistress _is_ she? With a scandal like this on her back, she has half a mind to free him from her service.

From the far end of the lawn, ducking under the forest’s tangled web, Briar Rose calls out, “My lady! Were you looking for me?”

Maleficent stills. She brushes the flames from her sleeves, and then just in time she also remembers to stamp them from her skirts. Luckily the day is bright and the light they throw is less obvious from a distance. She says, “No, my girl, I was only taking a walk.”

“Oh, good,” Briar Rose says. She holds up a broken trap, some vinework of the sort that peasants best understand. “One of my poor friends was caught by a poacher. I had a difficult time freeing him without doing any harm.” She sets the trap on a pile of odds and ends underneath the thatched covering of the roof, where the old machinery and the broken furniture wait in case of future usability. Maleficent had no idea how much repurposed garbage went into the running of a common mortal home.

“Your friend,” Maleficent says. The animals that keep the princess’s company have an instinctive aversion to her, and so she has only a dim idea of what they are or what they do all day. Generally speaking, she approves of this. Sheep ought to know better than to investigate wolves.

By the side of the stream, there is a basket piled high with wet clothing. Briar Rose stoops to it and effortlessly hoists it against her side. “They usually help me with the laundry,” she says, carrying the basket toward the drying line that stretches across the lawn. “They’re very dear things, always eager to lend a helping claw. I can’t imagine where they’ve got off to now—celebrating maybe? Well, I’m sure they deserve a break after a close call like that.”

Maleficent hangs back, cursing herself even as she does it. Nothing feels right here, all of the comfortable places and motions she’s grown familiar with suddenly strange and laughable, like fine royal jewelry with all the gems suddenly removed. What is she _doing_ here?

Briar Rose glances over her shoulder, a line of confusion between her perfect brows. “Are you coming?”

Dull as a sleepwalker, Maleficent goes and takes the basket from her, finding a seat on a stump within arm’s reach.

“I’ve been thinking,” Briar Rose says, as she shakes out her clean petticoats.

“What have you been thinking?”

Briar Rose hangs the skirts from the line behind the cottage, carefully fingering apart the wrinkles of cloth. “I want to go with you,” she says, “when you go. Back to your castle. I want to go with you.”

Maleficent snaps tense, her fingers tightening on the weave of the basket until the strands creak. Could that work? There were no spindles in Maleficent’s cold and bare castle, nor spinners of any kind. Perhaps she could accomplish what Flora and her cronies had been too thick to manage: hide the girl away from harm until the last minute passed from the anniversary of her birth.

 _No_ , that wouldn’t work. The spell was too old—it had grown up around the princess like a vine through a trellis. Even now Maleficent could see the ghosts of all their birth gifts on her, the pink of Flora’s beauty running a stitch through her cheeks, the green of Fauna’s talent twining through her throat, and then the shape of her own magic endlessly warring with Merryweather’s. Even now she can see the thorns of it spreading from the wretched child’s right hand. The spell is too old, it would only find a way to see itself done. Perhaps her godmothers would mount a rescue and drag her back home after all, just in time to prick her finger on her inevitable doom. As long as the spell remains, it will find a way to make itself flower.

Briar Rose is red in the face again, resolutely examining the laces of her clean undershirt. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about what you said. About marrying. And I thought, since you aren’t married—maybe you could marry me.”

As if the very floor of her heart has given way under the weight of so many frantic and conflicting emotions, Maleficent finds that she feels absolutely nothing. She is a hollow effigy, a directionless storm cloud. “That would be,” Maleficent says, “quite impossible.”

“Oh, no, not at all!” the girl says. She crushes linen to her chest, leaving a dark damp spot. “I know that women don’t marry women—I’m not silly, I’m sure if that was done I’d have heard about it somewhere. So I shall have to pretend to be a boy! I wouldn’t mind, honestly, not if it meant I could be with you.”

Maleficent finds her throat dry. “You couldn’t,” she croaks. There is no court to pretend for, no future to join up with—there is only Maleficent and her goblin hoards, and, a few days beyond that, the endless embrace of cursed sleep.

“Why?” the girl says. She snaps the wrinkles from a white cloth. “It can’t be that hard! As far as I can tell the only difference between men and women is that men wear breeches, and I’m sure I can do that as well as anybody else.”

“You don’t know any of the necessary skills,” Maleficent says, growing truly worried now. “Swordfighting, horse riding, table etiquette—there are a thousand things that young men begin learning from the cradle.”

Briar Rose pins up another petticoat and reaches for the next, unperturbed. “You shall simply have to tell them that I’m a layabout and a primp,” she replies. “An absolute good for nothing. I’ll learn as fast as I can, and if you help me—”

“No!” Maleficent snaps.

Briar Rose pauses. “No?” she says. “Are you sure? I really do think I could get the hang of—”

“No! None of it!”

Slowly, the girl lowers the garment in her hands. “You don’t—you don’t want me to go with you?”

“No,” Maleficent says, her voice creaking in her own throat.

“But—but I want to see you again! I want to see you forever! Don’t you want to see me?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Maleficent says, “because it’s impossible. You can’t go with me where I’m going.”

“Why not?” Briar Rose says, her eyes starting to well with tears. “Is it because I’m just a bumpkin from the country? Are you embarrassed by me?”

Maleficent has no idea what to do with these tears. The castle she’s begging so hard to see is a temple of darkness, a decaying fortress of evil—it’s impossible to make her understand when understanding is the very thing that Maleficent fears more than anything on this wretched earth. If the girl must die, she can at least die believing Maleficent has been a friend to her, sincere and honest and untarnished by the monstrous truth of all the fairy is and has done.

Maleficent looks away, fixing her hard gaze on the windows of the cottage. “You can’t go with me because I’m not what you think I am. You wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t like me.”

“Of course I would,” the girl says, and Maleficent can hear in her voice that she isn’t angry at all, only distressed and confused. “Why would you say that?”

Maleficent lets out a laugh that tears at her throat like glass. “Never mind that,” she says. “We’re both powerless now, I as much as you. The best we can do now is take our misfortune with some modicum of grace.”

“You don’t have to marry me, that was—I was only joking, you needn’t worry about that at all, I would be happy to go with you anywhere, as anything!”

“Nothing,” Maleficent says, darkly, “you are is enough.”

 Briar Rose reels back, her voice going small with pain. “Don’t say that. I love you, Madame.”

“No,” Maleficent says tightly. “Cease this.”

Briar Rose leaves her laundry forgotten, stepping across the grass to take Maleficent’s hands in her own. “Why don’t you want me?” she asks, pulling their joined hands close to her own chest. “Have I done something wrong?”

“You were born,” Maleficent says, refusing to look at her. “You were born, and damn me, I couldn’t just leave you be.”

“Please,” the girl says, “tell me what’s wrong. I can’t make it right if you won’t tell me.”

Maleficent would bury her hands in her hair and _pull_ if the girl didn’t have such a damned good grip.

Even supposing she were able to fight off the inevitability of a rescue, nothing good can come of this. For a half moment she can’t help but imagine it: the princess shaken and shivering from the thundercrack travel, her simple dress sparking and smoking—the howl of the wind through the castle, half ruins, as she realizes in one terrible moment the extent of her mistake, her fear, her tears—the slow souring and withering, the resentment, Briar Rose fading away to a shadow in the heart of the storm and the stone. Bile wells in Maleficent’s throat. She has kept prisoners before, many in her time, but none that she cared for. Something, she knows, would be irreparably broken by the end of it.

“You _can’t_ make it right,” Maleficent tells her. “And you can’t come with me.”

“Madame,” the girl pleads, her voice thick with tears, “ _Madame_ , Maleficent—”

Maleficent turns her head even farther. Fingers clutch her face, dragging her back to look the princess in the eye, squeezing the corners of her jaw bone.

“Maleficent,” says Briar Rose, and then more desperately, “ _Maalot_ , please, Maalot Belledam—”

She snatches her hands away as if burned. Every bone in the fairy queen’s body screams in distress—her skull cracks with pain as her pupils dilate, her lungs wrench closed and won’t open again, green fire seethes across her body, eating up the shape of her glamour. Flame races across her hands, leaving pale green in their wake. Maleficent collapses to her knees in the billowing sea of her cloak, clutching at her chest in the desperate attempt to pull her illusions back together, to hold them to herself.

“What—” the girl says, but her voice seems so far away.

Maleficent howls, despair and frustration boiling up out of her, as the last thread of illusion burns away. She is left panting, herself once again through and through.

“What have you done,” she breathes.

“M-madame,” says Briar Rose, “I—”

“You were never to use that name,” Maleficent hisses. She lifts her head at last, locking eyes with the girl who seems on the threshold of a dead faint.

“I’m sorry,” the girl chokes out.

Maleficent looks at her own hands, the green flesh and the beetle black nails. All at once, the dream is dead—the lovely lie of the last fortnight, the comforting fiction. A fallen insect on the earth, a hollow husk within its shell.

“Love,” she says, and bares her teeth. “Hah! Love indeed.”

The princess takes an unconscious step back, her foot skating along the grass. She is as white as the sheets that billow behind her. Slowly, Maleficent draws herself to her feet.

“Here I am,” she says, and stoops to catch the girl’s face in her hands, “here I am then! Do you love me still, child? Wicked, dishonest thing that I am? Monster? Do you love me after all?”

Pale but growing sturdier now, Briar Rose lifts her shaking hands to lay them on top of Maleficent’s. She grips them close, holds them tighter against herself. “Yes,” she says. She swallows. “Whatever you are,” she says. “Of course.”

Maleficent recoils, snatching her hands free. “You know nothing,” she says. “Foolish thing, you understand nothing.”

“Explain it to me then!” Briar Rose shouts, her eyes and nose wet, grasping at the neck of Maleficent’s robes. Her hands close in like the door of a cage, no doubt with her grip strong enough to crack weaker bones, and terror such as nothing Maleficent has felt in her entire ageless life wrenches her insides. Her staff flares to life in her hands, and then the air is ash, thunder, the grass becomes familiar stone—she leaves the forest behind entirely.

Through the veil of smoke that closes over her, the last thing that Maleficent sees of that clearing is the distressed flapping of white laundry, twisted by the gale, and Briar Rose’s eyes: wide, red, and frozen mid plea.

 

 

On the mountain of the Goblin Queen’s castle keep, it rains for seven days.

 

 

Among the quieting sheets of wet cotton, Briar Rose sits for a long time. Her hair is full of ash, and her palms are scorched from trying to hold a woman made of flame. She sits for a long time. Her mind is almost blank, a kind of peace like the silence that follows forest fires.

Eventually something nudges her hand. She blinks to find night falling, grey and red above the forest, and one of her friends underneath her palm. The poor confused thing paws at her finger, tilting its furry head.

“Oh,” she says. She hastily wipes at her drying face, fingers coming away smudged with ash mud. “I’m sorry, did I frighten you?”

More of her friends are peaking through the underbrush now, all of their liquid black eyes reflecting confusion and concern. Briar Rose thumbs at her eyelid, scraping away another tear. She tries for a smile. “Everything is fine,” she tells them. “It’s safe. You can come out.”

One by one they do come out. The owl perches on the post at the end of the laundry line and gives her the usual inquiry. The doe and her yearling inch closer.

“You’re probably—” she sniffs, hard, “—sorry, you’re probably wondering what happened…” At the general noise of agreement, she manages a laugh. “Well I am too,” she says.

The crowd of concern is too much for her. She reaches clumsily for the laundry basket and drags it to her side. “No point in sitting here feeling sorry for myself,” she tells them, but mostly herself. “We’re almost out of daylight.”

She finishes hanging her clothes with numb hands, the wet and the falling dark all cold around her skin. If only Fauna was here to hold her, to pet her hair. If only Merryweather were here to puff up and get angry on her behalf, to say all those things so that Briar Rose wouldn’t have to. If only Flora was here. Flora would break it down into steps, into pieces that they could put back together again in a way that made sense. Flora would say—Flora would say…

“What did you see,” Briar Rose murmurs to herself. “What’s the most likely explanation for that?”

She had seen such an awful fear on Maleficent’s face, such an animal desperation. How could she be afraid of Briar Rose? Surely her lady knows that she would never hurt her, no matter what she looks like, no matter what she might be—spirit or witch or devil, all of it is the same to Briar Rose. It’s all Maleficent. Even if her home is the pit of hell itself, none of it matters.

Briar Rose hangs the last of her linens slowly, smoothing wrinkles from the folds in increments. What _was_ Maleficent though, truly? Not a pilgrim, surely. Perhaps not even a lady? But she had the manners of a lady, the regal bearing. She had certainly sounded convincing when she spoke about her home. As despair cools and disperses, confusion rises up to fill its place.

She finishes her chores that night in a fog of questions, each object and each task reminding her of some new thing that Maleficent said or did. Her head hurts. If only Maleficent were here still, she had always been so patient with Briar Rose’s questions. She knew so many things, and unlike her aunties, Maleficent had never tiptoed around the difficult ones. If she had just stayed—

Whatever she had been so afraid of—whatever she had foreseen in Briar Rose, the girl was determined to prove her wrong, one way or another. If it was Briar Rose herself that frightened Maleficent so, then she would just have to show her how safe she was here, how loved, how wanted. And if it was something else, something outside of both of them, then—well then Briar Rose would do away with it, whatever it was. She wasn’t afraid. Or, rather, she was afraid, because Maleficent was a formidable woman and anything that frightened her would have to be very frightening indeed, but.

But afraid or not, any dire peril would be worth the cost just to see Maleficent smile at her again. Her smiles were so fragile and uncertain. Briar Rose would brave any danger to see another of them on her lips, drying beautiful and full in the sunlight.

Briar Rose falls asleep on her own pallet for the first time in weeks, the faint thunderstorm smell of her blankets pulled tight against her face.

 

 

High above the kingdom, the storms rages on.

 

 

As she moves through the house for the next two days, Briar Rose makes lists of the things she remembers about Maleficent. The sound of her singing, uncertainly searching out the correct note, her sharp palpable satisfaction when she finally found it. Her improbably silent steps through the forest, as if she were gliding over the tops of pine needles. Her shattered unhappy laughter. Her impatience with normal household chores.

Briar Rose has been raised her whole life to believe in the mountain-bending power of true love. She has no doubts, no hesitations. She sings to herself about dragons and queens and daring knights, for the first time understanding what it must feel like to stand beneath the tower where the dragon waits, to be so tiny and mortal and full of love.

She’ll go to Maleficent. As soon as her guardians are home, as soon as she has the house in order, she’ll go.

Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather arrive on the third morning, in a grumbling train that can be heard a mile off. When they travel, the three of them never seem to need sleep or pause the way Briar Rose always eventually does. When she was young she had tried to keep up with them, but sooner or later she awoke to find herself carried in someone’s arms, and then later tucked between the parcels on the back of the wagon. When she was young she had assumed that the problem was her own age, and that when she was older she too would be able to walk for days without rest. Now that she is older and still no more able to keep up, she is beginning to wonder. She hangs her apron on the hook and rushes outside, to the edge of the clearing, and then deeper into the woods, following the unmistakable sound of their voices.

She bursts through the trees and wraps herself tight around the first flash of blue she sees, squeezing Merryweather and lifting her up, like a doll, through the air. Merryweather give a little hiccup of laughter, embarrassed but pleased.

“Come on now, girl,” she says, wriggling a bit, “there’s no need for that. Here we are, safe and sound.”

Briar Rose can’t help it, and doesn’t really want to—she bursts out crying again, burying her face in Merryweather’s petit shoulder.

“Oh dear,” Merryweather says. “Flora, _Fauna!”_

The other two come rushing up, cracking twigs in their haste, and gently pry Merryweather free. Briar Rose wraps her arms around herself instead, and blinks down at them with her watery eyes. Flora takes her hand.

“What is it child?” she says, her grip firm and urgent. “Are you hurt? Has there been an accident?”

Briar Rose can’t answer. For one thing, she’s sobbing too hard. For another, she doesn’t know whether she should say she’s hurt or not. It certainly feels like it, but all the pain is on the inside, like a bruise. Fauna pushes through and flips her palms over, checks her limbs for blood.

“She _seems_ alright…” Fauna says. Her traveling hat is hanging askew on her head, unnoticed.

“I did something bad,” Briar Rose manages, swiping at her nose with her forearm, “and she left—”

“ _She?”_ all three of her guardians say at once.

“I didn’t mean it,” Briar Rose says, wretchedly. “I tried to explain—”

“Do you mean to tell us,” Flora says, “that you were with a stranger?”

“Oh, no—I mean, yes, but she wasn’t just a stranger. She was a lady!” Despite everything, Briar Rose smiles. Her face is wet and her vision is bleary, but she can no more remember the sight of Maleficent at the clearing’s edge without smiling than put her hands above a fire without feeling warmth.

Her guardians give each other uncertain, private looks. “My dear,” Flora says, “nobility or not, a stranger is a stranger. You know the rules.”

“I know,” says Briar Rose. Her smile slumps and falls away. “But she was such a fine lady, and so lost, and I couldn’t stand to think of her in danger—you’re always telling me how dangerous the word is for a woman alone, and I thought of her out there on the roads without even a horse…”

“The rules are for your protection,” Merryweather says. “You’re a kind girl, we all know that, but you’re in a lot of trouble regardless.”

“I wasn’t in any danger,” Briar Rose says. “She only needed a place to stay while her pilgrimage finished.”

“You let her _stay_ here?” Flora yelps.

“You don’t understand,” the girl says, “what else could she do? The inns are too dangerous and too far away, and I couldn’t just leave her in the forest! She wouldn’t have known what to do! You should have—” something that isn’t quite a sob and isn’t quite a laugh bubbles in her throat, “—you should have seen her try to make a meal, I’m certain she’d never been in a kitchen before in her life. She didn’t even know the difference between a strawberry and a poisonous love apple.”

“You could have been _hurt!”_ Merryweather says _._

“Oh, Maleficent would never hurt me.”

The three small women go absolutely pale, absolutely silent, their eyes each matching globes of horror. “Maleficent?” Flora whispers.

Briar Rose searches their faces for some kind of clue, a matching dread welling in her stomach. “Do you know her?” she asks, her thoughts rushing faster and faster until they reach a kind of incoherent frenzy. Where did her guardians come from? Hadn’t she always suspected it was some place far away? Hadn’t she always known they were odd for peasant women, the things they didn’t know, the things they struggled with? If they came from the same kingdom as Maleficent, why would they have left? Who were her parents? The question she has been too afraid to ask again since the first time it made Fauna cry, the question that dogs her steps each time she leaves the forest: who were her parents, and what had happened to them?

“Oh, Rose,” Fauna says, her voice breaking. She looks as if she is watching a terrible accident unfolding in front of her. “Rosie, has Maleficent been here?”

“How do you know her?” Briar Rose says, “Why do you all look so afraid?”                    

“Maleficent is—” Merryweather starts.

“—dangerous,” Flora finishes. “Did she do anything to you? Are you in pain?”

“She didn’t do anything to me,” Briar Rose says, “…except leave me. And—” she looks away, fists clutched tight against her chest, “and kiss me.”

“ _Kiss_ you,” Merryweather squawks. “Why would that heartless old villain _kiss_ you?”

Briar Rose flinches. “She’s my true love. And she’s not heartless, whatever else you may think of her,” Briar Rose says. “I’m certain she loves me too. I can feel it, even now.”

“ _Maleficent_?” Flora laughs, but it sounds more nervous than genuinely amused. “Maleficent can’t be your true love, child, that would be… that would be…”

“Absurd,” Merryweather finishes, fiercely.

“Besides,” Fauna reassures her, “you already have a true love!”

“I—I do?”

“Well certainly,” Flora says, adjusting the slipping angle of Fauna’s traveling hat. “You were betrothed at birth, to a very respectable young man, a very good match.”

“ _Betrothed_?” Briar Rose chokes out. Betrothed? At birth? To a man she’s never met? This doesn't make sense, she doesn’t understand—even the scullery maids in the towns get to see their husbands before they marry, and she has never even seen the face of the man she’s been assigned to marry? Never even heard his voice? “But,” she says, “but you told me... What about true love? I thought, I thought—”

Her guardians slowly start to sense that they’ve made a mistake. “My dear,” Flora says, “when we told you your true love was out there somewhere, what we meant was—”

“You meant some man I’ve never met! How can I love someone I’ve never met!” It seems a much crueler thing now than it might have a month ago, before she knew how sublime it was to fall in love in her own way. “Why did you tell me about true love,” she gasps, “if you never meant for me to have it?”

Fauna is wringing her hands. “Please,” she says, “this is all coming out wrong. We meant to tell you Rosie, we were going to tell you on your birthday.”

Merryweather steps forward, pulls on Briar Rose’s arm. “Let’s start from the beginning,” she says, “let’s go home, and let’s start from the beginning.”

Briar Rose allows herself to be pulled through the forest, her head too full of confusion and sorrow to mind much where her body might be. She feels faintly like a corpse being led to its grave, the funeral procession of a stranger glimpsed through the trees.

“This is good news,” Flora tells her, as they hurry through the woods, “I know it seems frightening right now, but I promise you it’s really very good news!”

Madly, Briar Rose wishes Maleficent were here right now. She wishes for that certainty, the calm cool voice, the elegant wisdom. More than anything, she wishes she could just ask Maleficent what's going on. It’s too tangled up now for her to piece together, ripped threads with no clear pattern, the fabric carelessly undone.

In the kitchen of their cottage, her aunties try to explain to her what is happening. They interrupt each other and trip over their own memories, lapsing into arguments that are entirely indecipherable to Briar Rose, who sits at the table and tries to drink her tea through a closed throat. First they tell her that the young man is a prince, and she doesn’t understand that at all—princes marry princesses, not young working girls. Then they tell her that her parents are alive, and they miss her, and she’s going home on her sixteenth birthday. _Going home_ has a terrible ring of finality, when they say it.

“ _This_ is my home,” Briar Rose says, clutching her cup, “if they want to see me now, after all these years, why don’t they come _here_?”

Fauna tries to explain that her parents wanted to see her very much for the last fifteen years. Merryweather says it wouldn’t have been safe. Flora remarks that it’s very difficult to visit anyone, let alone in secret, when one is running a kingdom.

Her father is a king? Briar Rose sits unmoving, unhearing, as she tries to understand this. She can see Flora’s mouth moving, but none of it registers. Her father is a king? She’s a princess? But she has no idea how to be a princess, any more than she knows how to breathe underwater. If she would have trouble passing for a regular nobleman, even as strong and as fast as she is, how in the world can she pass for a princess?

Is she, then, to go on in a matter of days to a position she knows nothing about, with a husband she has never met, in a castle she has never seen? She has lived all her life in the depths of a forest without a single human friend to her name, but this is the most terrifyingly lonely prospect she can imagine.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” she asks. Her voice is small, exhausted.

Her guardians exchange another of their secret worried glances. “You have to understand,” Flora says, “children are not very good secret keepers. And if word of your life here were ever to get out—”

“You still could have told me sooner,” Briar Rose says. She is too tired to cry any more. “Not the day that I was meant to leave forever.”

“ _I told you_ ,” Merryweather hisses, leaning in close to Flora, “I told you, we should have done it when she was thirteen, but you were so _superstitious_ —”

“It’s done now,” Flora snaps. She jams a loose wisp of hair back underneath her wimple. “This isn’t helping!”

Fauna approaches her child like a wounded animal, hesitating, and then wraps her small arms around the girl’s shoulders. “We were so afraid for you,” she murmurs, “with Maleficent searching high and low for you, we were afraid to even breathe too loudly.”

“Maleficent,” Briar Rose echoes. “You still haven’t explained…”

Here is the truth. Briar Rose remembers Maleficent this way: first, standing on the edge of the brook, commanding and helpless, the way her heart beat fast when Briar Rose pulled her against her chest. Then, at the edge of the clearing, regal on her enormous steed, like a wish come true in flesh. Bemused, certain, impatient and confused, the Maleficent that Briar Rose loves is a woman who is both formidable and lonely, a woman who knows so much about the world and so little about herself. She is a woman who has fallen asleep on Briar Rose’s shoulder, wilted flowers tangled in her pitch black hair. And finally, green and smoking and terrified, a vision that will haunt Briar Rose until the day she finally sets all of this right.

The Maleficent that her guardians describe is frighteningly different. This Maleficent is a cruel tyrant, a petty villain, a heartless monster. This Maleficent is a creature from an alien world, too strange even to be accepted by the family that bore her. She is the instrument of misfortune, happy only when she is grinding mortal lives down to mortal dust.

How can two such improbably truths coexist? Someone _must_ be wrong, either her aunts or herself. It’s hard to believe that someone could pretend to be something so utterly untrue to their nature for so long—her aunts seem to have known Maleficent for years and years, but Briar Rose has _lived_ with her, so who then has the right of it?

When her guardians have exhausted themselves with explanations, they settle against the oven and sigh, staring through the walls into some world that only they seem to understand.

“What now?” Merryweather says, at some length. “She knows where we are.”

“We should take Rose back to the castle,” Fauna says. “She’s afraid. She needs her parents.”

“It won’t be any safer there,” Flora says. “We need to go on the move. We only have a few days before the window for the curse is shut. If we can just stay ahead of her that long…”

“We should stay and fight,” Merryweather says, balling up her little fists. “I’m tired of hiding. I say we stand our ground.”

Briar Rose looks up from her cold tea. Her guardians’ faces are blanched with fear, hard with determination. They’ve lied to her for her entire life, but they raised her nonetheless. It’s obvious that they are afraid now. They’re afraid for their own safety and for hers, and she can’t hate them when they’re so afraid and still so determined, so willing to protect her come what may. Whatever they may have done wrong, she’s no less certain that they love her now as they did a month ago. Swallowing thickly, Briar Rose makes the decision to forgive them for it all. She forgives them, and she puts all of it quietly behind herself.

“I’m going,” she says.

“That’s alright dear,” Flora says, without looking at her, “we’ll let you know once we figure it out.”

“No,” Briar Rose says, “no, I mean, I’m leaving.”

All three of them look at her as if they can’t understand what she’s said. “You don’t mean by yourself, do you?”

Briar Rose pulls herself from her seat—she thinks of that same chair a few nights ago, Maleficent’s flushed shining lips, and is only more certain—and she heads for the stairs. “I have to go,” she says, “I have to find her. I have to ask her.”

There’s a rush of feet behind her, someone knocks over the chair in their haste. “You can’t be serious!” Flora says. They race to catch up with her as she climbs the stairs, shouting after her.

The girl goes to her dresser and pulls out some clean underthings, another petticoat, her shawl. She tucks them into her traveling bag, ignoring the women who try to catch her hands and make her stand still. There’s a wishbone on her dresser top, a gift from the wolf that she had found one winter, his foot caught in a trap. She freed him and brought him home and fed him, and he watched her with his suspicious black eyes until her finally fell asleep on the hearth. Owls eat squirrels and wolves eat sheep, and Briar Rose knew that nature was as nature was. All she could do was speak for herself, a member of mankind. She folds the wishbone, delicate and unbroken, in a kerchief and packs it away. It’s a good reminder that the world is always more complicated than it first appears to be.

“Rosie, see sense!” Merryweather says, stamping her foot.

Briar Rose pauses, at last, and sets down her mostly packed bag. “Flora,” she says, “Fauna. Merryweather. You’ve always taken such good care of me. I love you as much as if you had each been my own birth mother. I know you’re only trying to protect me, but you’ve done as much for me as you can now.”

“Nonsense,” Flora says. “You’re not even sixteen!”

“Not even sixteen is apparently old enough to be betrothed,” Briar Rose says. “Old enough to fall in love. Old enough to die.”

“Where will you _go?”_ Fauna says. “Where are you going that we can’t come with you?”

Briar Rose closes her bag and ties it around her neck, feeling distantly as if she is preparing for another of their old family ventures into the towns. “I need to find Maleficent,” she says. “I need to ask her. I need to hear her tell me.”

“You can’t go _there,”_ Merryweather says, to a chorus of urgent agreements. “She’ll eat you up! That’ll be the end of it!”

Briar Rose tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Then that will be the end of it,” she says. She shuts the window and locks it.

That was always going to be the end of it, she thinks. How could it end any other way?


	5. The Noble Hero

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dame, je sui cilz qui vueil endure  
> Vostre voloir, tant com porray durer:  
> Mais ne cuit pas que longuement l'endure  
> Sans mort avoir, quant vous m'estes si dure  
> -[Guillaume de Machaut](https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/10/17/medieval-love-songs/)

Briar Rose leaves her home, alone, for the first time in her life, with only what she can carry on her back. The monstrous steed that Maleficent arrived on weeks ago tosses its head nervously under the shadow of the forest, watching her say her goodbyes. Her guardians gather at the door, sick with worry, and tuck flowers into her hair.

“If you feel afraid, or alone,” Flora says, cupping the girl’s face in her hands, “take one of these down and crush it between your fingers.”

Briar Rose still has questions, but they can wait for later. When she comes home again—and she believes that she will—there will be time enough to ask them what they are, and where they come from, and why they’ve spent sixteen years raising her in secret. They tell her that Maleficent’s keep is fifteen days away on foot, and she must move quickly if she is to have any hope of averting her own doom. They tell her it won’t be an easy journey. They tell her that if she ever wants to give up and come home, she only has to say the word.

The massive steed lowers its head as she crosses the clearing towards it, reflecting her own approach in its liquid black eyes. Now that Maleficent is gone, and her spell torn behind her, it’s clear that this isn’t a horse like any horse ever born on Christian soil. There’s something of the goat in its horned head, and something of the hare in its distorted hind legs.

Briar Rose reaches slowly for its head, tracing a thumb over its powerful jaw. “Do you miss your mistress too?” she asks it. “Is that why you’re waiting for me?”

It snorts.

“Let’s find her, then,” Briar Rose says. She gives the beast’s back a speculative look, not quite sure what to do with the ornate tack that seems never to come off. Truth be told she’s never ridden a horse before, mortal or otherwise. “Er,” she says, “should I…?”

It tosses its head, possibly in irritation, and then kneels its forelegs to the earth. Briar Rose chews her lip for a second, and then goes for it before she can second guess herself. She grabs the powerful neck and throws a leg over its back, and then scrabbles desperately to find her seat as it pushes upright again and takes off, leaping over the shaded forest floor.

The woods give way to a true wilderness about a day’s walk to the east. Briar Rose clings for dear life and watches the path eaten away before her, and thinks that this is going at least three times faster than it usually does. She might just make it in time. She might just make it.

By the time the sun sets, she is hopelessly far beyond anything she recognizes. Her hear sinks as she realizes that there’s no way she can keep this up all night, let alone three days. Part of her always expected riding to be restful. Riding is _not_ restful, although it is faster than walking by leaps and bound. Her shoulders and hands are sore from clutching knots of mane, and her thighs are sore from bracing for impact on each landing. She’s going to need to dismount and sleep at some point, and she’s got a bad feeling about how her muscles will feel in the morning. She leans forward and says this into one of the beast’s flicking ears, apologizing for the trouble.

By the time the moon has appeared between the canopy’s gaps, her mount has slowed its gait to some kind of trot, huffing as it scents the air like a hound. It brings them to the gate of a cottage between two huge elm trees, where a candle still burns in the window.

When Briar Rose was a child, she was forbidden to speak to anyone other than her aunties. Most of her memories of other people are from the height of a child, looking up at a strange and somewhat frightening creature beyond her limited understanding. In the towns they visited, she had felt more kinship with field mice lost in the village square than with the humans who made their homes in the houses above. Standing at the door now, she feels a foot shorter and a decade younger, again the trembling field mouse lost in an alien world. She digs her fingers into her hair, ripping free the first flower that meets her fingers.

It’s a primrose blossom, deep pink and unwilted despite the late hour. She crushes it between her fingers, smearing a faint red into her skin. The smell that rises from it is like the smell of rising bread, expensive spices, rare sheets of parchment. As if she is hearing it whispered into her ear, she remembers Flora saying to her, the way that she would from time to time, “Be brave, my dear.”

With a deep breath, Briar Rose closes her fist around her crushed flower and knocks on the door.

The house itself is well lived in, she can see, although the roof leaks and the cracks in the walls are stuffed with old rags. The old man ushers her inside almost before she can explain, offering her the lone chair at his incongruously long table. It looks like a dining table from a palace to her, with feet carved in the shape of a lion’s paws.

“You must excuse the clutter,” says the old man, hurriedly shoving piles of junk off the table and onto the floor. In the mess she thinks she can make out pieces of armor so rusted that they seem to be made from red bark. “I do my best, but it gets away from me. You know how it is.”

“Of course,” says Briar Rose, who doesn’t even own enough things to cover a table like this.

In the clay pot beneath the leak in the roof, there is a small leafy plant. The more she peers into the dimness, the more she sees of the tiny plant islands. She bends down and touches the leaves, which seem perfectly natural and plenty alive.

“Are you an apothecary?” she asks.

“Hm? Oh, no!” the old man laughs. “It just seems like such a waste to leave buckets full of water lying around where no one can use them! The bugs lay eggs in them and the cats knock them over, and I thought to myself, Yannick, wouldn’t a small plant be grateful to have such a nice home with you and your cats?”

Briar Rose scans the shelves, and among the clutter spots a pair of curious golden eyes. “Why don’t you just drink it yourself?” she asks.

Yannick smiles like she has just told his favorite joke and he’s eager to reach the punchline. He taps the side of his nose, and he says, “Ah, smart girl. Would you like to see a trick?”

At her nod, he lopes to the back of the room and lifts from the darkness a smooth round stone, the size of an egg and black as a stormy night. He carries it to her and holds it out, cupped between his hands. “Put out your palms, miss,” he says. Once her hands are out, he shakes the stone once and says, “A drop.”

From the stone, a single drop of clear cold water plops into Briar Rose’s open palm. She lets out an astonished laugh, taking the stone from Yannick and flipping it turnwise, running her fingers over it from end to end. It is flawless, without a single pinprick opening for water to fall from.

“Do you like it?” Yannick asks, bright eyed with laughter. “It’s magic.”

“Where in the world did you get this?” Briar Rose says, tapping it with her knuckle. It’s sold through and through.

“You might not believe it to look at me,” Yannick says, “but in my youth, I was actually a brave young hero.”

“You were?” Briar Rose lowers the stone, even more interested now in the man before her. Wizened and a little hobbled by age, it’s hard to imagine him as a young man of any kind. She’s never actually seen a person grow old in front of her, though. Everyone she meets is frozen in the moment that she meets them, an instant of their life isolated under her observation.

The old man puffs up his chest, as best he can. “I was Prince Yannick the clever,” he says. “Maybe you’ve heard of me?”

It does sound familiar. “Maybe,” she says. “I’ve heard of Ivan the Clever, who stole a river from a wicked wizard at the top of the world.”

The puff of air goes out with a sigh. “Well, I guess I should be glad there’s anything left of me at all.” He takes back the stone and gently returns it to its nest of clutter. “It belonged to the court magician of the kingdom north of here. My kingdom was in the middle of a terrible drought, so I went north and stole this stone from under his cheek in the dead of night. He chased me with his dogs,” Yannick sighs, again, but this time with a fond smile. “I conjured a flood to wash the bridge away.”

“I do know this story!” Briar Rose says, “And then you brought the water home to your kingdom, married the princess who lived at the center of the dry sea, and lived happily ever after!”

Yannick pats her hand, and then scoops up a passing tabby cat. “Well,” he says, “I suppose they have to say that don’t they? But the truth of the matter is that seventy years is an awfully long time to live, and nothing lasts forever. My wife died young, and then I had to contend with an endless stream of young men trying to take my magical stone back to their own kingdoms, and there were brothers ahead of me in line for the throne, and by the end of it all I was so exhausted that I didn’t complain much when my eldest brother advised me to choose a country villa away from the court and all the political schemers who thought I might make a better replacement for my late father.”

Briar Rose presses her knuckles to her lips. “Oh,” she says. “I’m so sorry, I had no idea—”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Yannick says, “there’s no need for that. It’s been a good life all in all, and I’m happy here, truth be told. I could use a little more company from time to time, but I’m glad to be away from the court. No idea who’s running the place these days, of course. I lost track when the duke deposed my brother and I lost the villa.”

Briar Rose feels the urge to apologize again, but before she can open her mouth to try, Yannick pushes the tabby cat into her arms. It blinks its suspicious cat eyes up at her, but allows itself to be held all the same.

“You won’t be a young adventurer forever,” Yannick tells her, making his way across the room. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your adventures where you can get them. You’ll die someday, and so will I, so we had better make the most of it now, eh?”

“That’s true,” Briar Rose says. She scratches the cat’s sleek head.

“What are you questing after,” Yannick asks, “if you don’t mind me asking? I can recognize a fellow adventurer in any light.”

“My true love,” Briar Rose says. “My true love is in a castle far away.”

“Ahh,” Yannick says. “True love. Nothing more noble in the world than true love.”

Briar Rose buries her face in soft cat fur, eyes stinging. “I’m betrothed,” she confesses, “but I’m not betrothed to my true love. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to let anybody down, but I never agreed to marry anyone, and certainly not a man I’ve never met.”

“That’s tricky,” Yannick says. He pushes a stack of firewood across the floor, to the side of the table, and sits down on top of it. “That’s the trickiest one of all. Of course, I was a prince once, so I know a bit about politics. I’ve seen countless arranged marriages come and go, and I’ll tell you what I know about them. When they work, they work wonders. But most of the time they don’t work. You’ll be married a year and your brother will suddenly decide he wants to invade after all, and there’s nothing you can say that will change his mind. Or sometimes there’s a problem producing an heir, and the nobility revolts.”

“That sounds _horrible_ ,” Briar Rose says. She imagines herself in a foreign court, alone among still more strangers, in the middle of a war that she has no say in.

Yannick nods thoughtfully. “I’d say, in the end, be smart, but don’t let anyone tell you that you _have_ to do anything. If you have responsibilities, you have to put those first. But sometimes the solution to the problem isn’t what other people tell you it is. Anyways,” he adds, “marriage is a partnership, whatever the papacy might say about it. Both people have to be equally determined to make it succeed.”

“Thank you,” Briar Rose says. The cat purrs against her chest, nosing at her wrist. “I haven’t been able to talk about this to anyone yet. It’s nice to start.”

Yannick waves her off. “It’s my pleasure,” he says. “For my part, I find it nice to talk to another person about anything for a while.” He folds his hands on the table. “You’re welcome to stay the night,” he says, “although I don’t have much to share with you.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind.”

Yannick shrugs, but he smiles too. “There’s a bit left in this old candle,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me about your true love?”

For a moment the candle seems brighter, the room seems warmer, and Briar Rose’s heart seems just a fraction lighter. “Oh yes,” she says, “I would love to.”

Far away, through the night, a storm blows over the roof of the forest, but Yannick’s house is warm and safe and his plants happily soak up whatever rain makes it down into the cottage.

 

 

Briar Rose departs with the dawn the next morning, and returns to her dazzlingly quick passage through the deep forest. Here there are trees larger than she’s ever seen, enormous gnarled trunks with limbs that plunge into the earth on all sides like spider legs. Maleficent’s steed leaps from gnarled root to gnarled root, the clatter thump of its heavy hooves nearly swallowed by mossy silence. Briar Rose has an awful lot to think about, but in time that too is swallowed by the rhythm and the quiet, and she thinks of nothing at all.

They have traveled far beyond the realm of anything she’s seen before now, and by the end of the day they’ve broken into the open sky of a great river valley, its edges as stark as if they had been carved out with a kitchen knife. They leap from stone to stone down the length of the riverbed, following the current and the breaking waves deeper into unknown territory. Briar Rose sits forward, squinting into the setting sun as she spots a long figure among the stones ahead. It looks like a woman crossing a natural ford, clattering her cane against the flat rocks that spanned the river. An old woman shouldn’t be crossing a river like this alone, and certainly not with a cane.

The splash of the river and the vulnerable outline of the stranger remind her keenly of the day she first met Maleficent. Not quite able to dispel the pounding in her chest at the memory—painful but sweet—she pats the beast’s neck and slows their passage to a stop on the stone ahead of the traveler, just a leap away from where she is making her slow way from one shore to another. She has her shawl hung heavy over her head, steadfastly ignoring Briar Rose and her steed as well.

“Hello there!” Briar Rose calls, over the rush of water. “You shouldn’t be walking this way by yourself, madam! Let me carry you the rest of the way!”

The traveler pauses, as if startled, and turns her head vaguely in Briar Rose’s direction. With a sharp pang of horror, the girl realizes her mistake. This woman isn’t so very old, and her cane is not meant to support wearying bones at all. Under the heavy shadow of her shawl, her eye sockets are closed over, as if what lay beyond was a perfect emptiness. The skin all around those hollows is pearlescent with old scars, a chicken scratch of tiny overlapping lines. Briar Rose claps her hand to her mouth.

“Oh,” she says, “oh no, no madam, whoever left you here by yourself is a true villain. Are you alright?”

The traveler wrinkles her lip. “I’m perfectly fine,” she says, “and I’d appreciate it if you’d get out of my way.”

“But you’re blind!” Briar Rose says. “You can’t possibly cross this river alone!”

“I’ve crossed this river every day for the last twenty years,” the traveler says. “If you don’t get out of my way, I’ll push you off the side.”

Briar Rose takes an uncertain step backwards, a little wounded. “There’s no need for that,” she says. “I was only trying to help.”

“Help,” the traveler snorts. “Nobody helped me when I was learning how to cross this damned thing, and I don’t need help now either. Save your pity for somebody who wants it.”

Briar Rose sidesteps the sweeping cane, carefully falling into step beside the traveler. Her mount rolls its dark eyes and leaps the rest of the way to the shore in one easy push. “You’re not being very nice,” she says, hurriedly pushing her loose hair back under her hair band.

The traveler scuttles faster, the end of her cane rapidly thumping from rock to rock. “Nice,” she says. “ _Nice_. I know your type, missy. I’ve got no interest in being the poor feeble old peasant who helps you cross the mountains of doom or wherever you’re going in this godforsaken country.”

Briar Rose loses a step, and then rushes to catch up. “I was only—”

“ _Trying to help_ ,” the traveler says, “yes, I heard you. Heroes like you—” she huffs, “—leave a trail of broken people behind you. Who knows what damage you’re on your way to do. I won’t be party to that.”

The traveler hops down into the pebbled sand of the far shore, her damp hems catching a pale frosting of the sand as she strides on, more steady now, her chin firmly in the air. Briar Rose hangs back on the last stone, heart sunk, her hands loose and useless at her sides. Part of her is angry. Most of her is uncertain. As the traveler disappears up the far bank without a backwards glance—why would she, though, without eyes to glance with—Briar Rose slinks back to a higher stone, this one not smoothed by years of heavy traffic, and climbs up. She pulls her knees against her chest.

Last night she’d gotten along so well with Yannick that she’d made the mistake of assuming that everything would be equally simple and straightforward for the rest of her journey. All at once people seem much more complicated than she first took them to be. Yannick had known just what she meant when she spoke to him. Maleficent—her heart twinges again—had made the whole process of discussion seem so easy, with her clear answers and precise questions.

Briar Rose senses that she’s done something wrong, but she doesn’t understand what. The longer she sits here trying to unravel her anger from her guilt, the more frustrating it becomes. She buries her fingers in her hair and cards through the strands anxiously, faster and faster, until in all her tugging one of the remaining flowers comes free in her hand. She pauses. The flower is delicate and white, barely bigger than her pinky nail. It hasn’t wilted at all. She rolls it between her fingers, until she smells fresh turned dirt and soap, and a grey smell like coming rain. As if it is being whispered into her ear, she hears Fauna’s voice saying, as she often did, “Be kind, Rosie. Always kind, before anything else.”

Briar Rose flicks the crushed flower onto the stone beside her. But she had been kind! And all it had done was get her snapped at and accused of things she didn’t understand.

Absently, she watches Maleficent’s beast stick its great fearsome nose into a cubbyhole on the bank and rear back, sneezing, from the cloud of dust that blew back out. On the other hand, she thinks, the point of being kind isn’t that it makes people do things. The point of being kind is being kind. And more than that, telling people what they can and can’t do isn’t really very kind to begin with. She stands by offering to help that woman across the river, but maybe, she can admit, it would have been better to just accept a no.

Briar Rose sits there for a while longer, as the sky starts to dim little by little, and then she hops down from her perch and catches up with her transport again. Together they take the path through the woods ahead at the more sedate pace of last night, leaping a few fallen branches as they go.

They’ve only made it a little way into the forest when they find the road ahead thoroughly blocked off, an ancient oak limb fallen in the aftermath of the previous night’s storm. As they slow down to survey the damage, Briar Rose notices the quiet flap of a dark gray shawl in one of the bristling branches. It hangs awkwardly, trailing down the far side and disappearing.

Briar Rose dismounts. “Hello?” she calls. “Is someone nearby?”

There’s a grunt from the far side of the fallen limb, and then the traveler’s voice says, “Not _you_ again.”

Briar Rose rushes over and scales the bark, clambering up until she can peer over the top. Below, suspended like the hanged man on a tarot card, there is the same lady traveler from before. Her ankle is pinned between two up-facing branches, the whole weight of her body forcing her ankle as deep into the juncture as possible. It looks deeply uncomfortable, and not a little embarrassing. Briar Rose winces.

“Um,” she says. “Are you alright down there?”

The traveler swears at her, kicking madly at the pinning branch as if the pure power of her anger could splinter heavy wood.

Briar Rose bites her lip. She’s not keen on getting snapped at again, or sworn at more, but that doesn’t look like the kind of predicament anyone could get themselves out of alone, blind or not.

“I could fetch someone from down the road if you like…?”

“I live alone,” the traveler grinds out. “There’s no one down the road to _get_.”

“Then,” Briar Rose says, “I could help?”

The traveler lets out a yowl like a furious cat, slams her heel into the wood so hard the tree seems to shudder, and then falls sullenly limp. That certainly seems to be acquiescence of one kind or another. With a deep breath, like a diver about to go under, Briar Rose scurries down the far side and loops her arms around the woman’s waist. She braces herself and lifts, pushing the traveler high enough that she can grab hold of another branch and lever herself free. The ankle comes free easily enough, but swollen from pressure and scraped raw from the bark. When the traveler lands on the ground, the injured leg nearly goes out from under her.

“That doesn’t look good,” Briar Rose murmurs.

“Oh, doesn’t it?”

Briar Rose climbs down after her. There is a faint shadow on the earth as Maleficent’s beast goes flying overhead, landing in a graceful splatter of mud a few feet away.

“Would you let me take you home?” Briar Rose asks. “I don’t want anything from you, I’m just worried about your leg.”

The traveler sighs, but sticks out her hand palm open. Not one to miss an opening, Briar Rose takes her hand and shows her how to get up into the saddle, swinging up behind her as soon as she seems properly situated. The beast is no more perturbed by the weight of two women than it was by one, and immediately takes off in a trot the moment Briar Rose has found the stirrups with her toes.

The traveler’s house lies a little ways deeper down the trail, in an old house that seems half constructed out of the strange stone pillars of some ancient villa. It is a ghostly house, hardly fit for human livelihood. As Briar Rose helps her down from her seat, she eyes the way the ground around it has been patterned with stones, as if outlining a series of branching paths. Probably, with the help of the cane, they would be a pretty reliable way to be sure of the direction you’re going.

The traveler flicks dust that she cannot see from her sleeves, a sour expression on her lips. “What’s your name, girl?” she asks.

“Briar Rose, madam.”

The woman turns and makes her tap-tap-tapping way towards the door. “Zhanna,” she says, which is presumably her own name. “Well don’t hang around on the lawn like some kind of burglar. Get the door.”

Briar Rose rushes to get the door.

“You’ll be expecting a place to sleep,” Zhanna sniffs, ducking through the opening without breaking her stride. “Well you can have the spot under the table, but my bed is beside the hearth and I’m not moving it for the king himself. Grab the bucket under the window. We need water and I’m in no condition to fetch it myself.”

Briar Rose closes the door after them, and turns to get her first good look at the room itself. It is ascetic but dustless, sparklingly clean from the stone slab floor to the unplastered wooden walls. On the old table there’s a marvelous china service, each place set out with ornate wooden spoons. The cushions of each roughhewn wooden chair glint with silk, and the dresses hanging in the window are old but rich, covered in lace and decorative buttons.

“These are beautiful,” Briar Rose says, reaching up to touch the faded yellow cotton.

“They _were_ the height of fashion,” Zhanna informs her. “I used to have more. There was one with pearl buttons. I sold the buttons a few years ago, but the bastards in town wouldn’t give me half what they were worth.”

“Where did they come from?” Briar Rose asks. It seems a shame to take apart something so lovely, but then, often one had no choice but to dismantle a broken machine.

Zhanna brushes her graying hair back from her forehead, smoothing it back down into the stern bun it must have begun the morning as. “I was a lady once,” she says, pausing for a moment in the memory of some distant moment. “I lived in a fine house outside the capitol, with my mother and my sister. And,” she adds, deep lines forming at the edges of her mouth, “ _her_.”                                                                                                            

“Her?”

“Water,” Zhanna says. “Hop to it. If you must know, I’ll tell you after you’re done.”

Briar Rose hops to it. As abrasive as Zhanna is, the woman isn’t entirely unlikable—there’s a stubborn magnificence in the way she carries herself that echoes of Maleficent, regal and unbent. You can’t help but like someone who works so hard just to look effortless. Briar Rose follows the stone lined path back to the well and pulls up a bucket of water, admiring the mostly straight rows of the vegetable garden. They look rigorously weeded. She imagines Zhanna ripping up grass by the roots in her yellow cotton dress and laughs, certain that Zhanna would never hear of such a thing.

Zhanna puts on a cauldron of soup and sits down at the end of the table, her stitched and scarred eyes pointed at nothing in particular. Although there’s nobody to notice whether she does or not, Briar Rose tries to keep looking at them, even when she would rather look away. Zhanna’s face is frightening, but is probably much worse to wear than to look at.

“My twin and I were born,” Zhanna says, “to my mother and her first husband. He died when I was young, leaving dire debts behind him, and we had our share of difficult years until my mother finally remarried. He was a widower with a daughter of his own. His health was poor, though, and soon my mother was widowed again. The four of us carried on living together for a number of years after that, on the property that belonged to my stepsister.” Zhanna places her hands on the tabletop, crossed stiffly over each other, as the cauldron begins to steam behind her. “I won’t try to make it sound nicer than it was. Ivanka and I weren’t always kind to our stepsister. Mother resented having yet another mouth to feed. I remember we used to throw stones at the birds that roosted on her mother’s grave. It upset her terribly. She was milder than we were, and cried quite a lot. We thought we were entitled to a certain amount of cruelty.”

For a moment the story sinks to silence. Briar Rose shifts uneasily, moved with pity for the little stepsister and uncertain whether she ought to reproach the story teller now, all these years later.

“Well in any case,” Zhanna says at last, “there was a prince of course, and we all savaged each other trying to catch his interest. When the riddle was announced we each traveled to the palace with our own answer. Ivanka had a spoon made from solid silver, or some such cookware. Of course the foolish thing tarnished immediately. I had a spindle made from gold.”

Zhanna points unenthusiastically towards the mantle of the fireplace, where indeed something made from gold does seem to be situated. Briar Rose has no idea what a spindle is for, but it does have a sort of appealing roundness, its tip glittering sharp.

“Foolish,” Zhanna says again, dropping her hand. “The metal was too soft.”

“But what was the riddle?”

“You haven’t heard the riddle?” Zhanna asks, brows creasing. “Are you foreign? I should have thought every woman in the kingdom knew the riddle.”

“Not me,” Briar Rose says. “I’ve lived a long time without seeing many people.”

“Let me see, I forget the words precisely. I think we were asked to find a tool fit for the perfect wife. Ivanka thought the solution must lie in cooking. I thought it must be spinning. We were both wrong of course.”

“What was it, then?”

 “Giovanna never told us.” Zhanna sits perfectly straight, like a cat concealing an injury. “I gather it wasn’t a thing at all, though, because she was quite empty handed when she left home. Perhaps,” the woman goes on, stiffly, “Giovanna only brought her ears. She was always a tremendous listener. In my old age I’ve begun to suspect that we were a bit too literal in those days.”

“Your stepsister married the prince?”

“Yes, well, I’m sure you know her as the queen nowadays.”

“The queen,” Briar Rose echoes. She touches her own ears, trying to imagine this woman Giovanna as her own mother. Do they look at all alike?

“She gives me a pension, which I’m sure she thinks is fair,” Zhanna says, wrinkling her lip. “I’d say I’m owed it, after what her birds did to my eyes.”

Dread pools in the pit of Briar Rose’s stomach. “She did that to you?”

Zhanna turns her head, although it’s not clear what good that does her. “Her birds, anyways,” Zhanna says. She gestures vaguely at her scarred face. “Ivanka and I showed up at her wedding uninvited. They swarmed us at the door of the cathedral and pecked them right out. We never even made it over the threshold.”

“I’m sorry,” Briar Rose says, her throat knotting painfully.

Zhanna snorts. “Don’t apologize for other people’s doings,” she says. “You’ll make enough mistakes of your own without taking on more.”

“Still,” Briar Rose murmurs. “Still, I’m sorry that happened to you. I don’t think you deserved it.”

“You don’t know what I deserved,” Zhanna says, but for the first time she sounds neutral rather than irritated.

“I don’t think _anyone_ deserves that.”

When the cauldron starts to rattle, Zhanna stands and tends to it, disappearing into a fog of scalding mist. She hardly seems to notice. Briar Rose watches her, trying to imagine the stepsister who left her behind.

“Do you think,” she says, “do you think the king and queen are bad people?”

Zhanna’s spoon hovers over the pot, and then disappears inside. “What do I know about bad and good?” she says. “I’m good at being blind and she’s good at being a queen. I was bad at solving riddles and she was good at it. Birds are birds, people are people.”

After a moment of consideration, Briar Rose removes the traveling bag from around her shoulders. She pulls out the folded kerchief with the wishbone gift wrapped inside. The kerchief was Maleficent’s. The bone was the wolf’s.

“I think,” she says, slowly, “that the world is much more complicated than I thought it was.”

Zhanna leans past her and snatches her china bowl off the table. “You remember that,” Zhanna says, “when it comes time for you to have a wedding.”

Briar Rose doesn’t respond. She turns the wishbone over in her hands, again and again. A wolf does what’s natural for a wolf, that’s easy enough to understand. But when people are cruel to each other, how can someone begin to understand that?

She jumps when Zhanna drops the bowl of soup in front of her, drops of something thick and fragrant spilling across the tabletop. “Don’t mope,” she says. “It’s not your problem to solve.”

“If I knew someone who had done something horrible. If I knew someone who had done something horrible to me, what do you think ought to be done about it?”

Zhanna hums noncommittally. “Do I think you ought to have their eyes pecked out by birds?”

“No,” says Briar Rose. She shakes her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “Am I allowed to forgive someone who’s done something terrible?”

Zhanna sits down at the other end of the table. She seems thoughtful, although it’s hard to tell. She says, “Nobody can tell you how to handle your business, girl. Least of all me.”

 

 

Briar Rose dares to kiss Zhanna on the cheek before she leaves the next morning, as the woman is handing her over her bag. After all, she is sort of like an aunt. The sound of grumbling lasts all the way to the road, and then there is only the sound of wind rattling the treetops. Through the gap in the canopy, Briar Rose can just make out the shape of the mountain that holds the goblin keep, blue behind the mist of distant rain. Long after it’s been swallowed by foliage, she feels it heavy on the edge of her sight.

What will she says when she finally arrives? She set out to find answers, but now she’s not even sure of her questions. She wants to know why Maleficent did it all—why she cast the spell and why she came to the river a month ago, and why she seemed so afraid the moment before she disappeared. Was she afraid that Briar Rose would realize the truth? Was she afraid of retribution? Was she right to be afraid?

And then the matter of her birth family, who had given her this unfamiliar Latin name and promptly left her to the care of three strangers. Are they good people? How would she even know, if it came down to that? For most of her life she assumed that her parents had died long ago. She’d wished often that they were still around to answer her questions, but knowing that they _had_ been around, only elsewhere, living their own lives that had nothing to do with her…

As darkness falls that evening, Briar Rose and her steed arrive at the gate of a house on a hill. The fence is crooked and barely higher than her own knee, and at either side of the gate two weathered skulls burn like warding lights, yellow and purple and orange deep in their staring sockets. What kind of monster would mount human skulls at their door? What kind of murderer could be so brazen? Briar Rose shivers into the tangled mane around her fingers.

“Not here,” she says, “please, we’ll keep going. I can keep going.”

The steed simply tosses its head and waits, sheens of yellow and purple and orange catching in its coat. She waits as long as she can and then, with her heart in her mouth, climbs down. Under the barest touch of her fingers, the gate swings open.

Her toes scuff each huge flat stone on her slow journey to the door. The air smells of wood smoke and burning fat, pungent incenses too strange to be entirely pleasant. When she knocks, the sound seems to rattle like the other side is a hollow box. There is a moment of terrible anticipation, wet and cold in her mouth, and then a bright eye peers through the crack that opens just a sliver.

“Be gone with you,” the person on the other side says, a creaking thin woman’s voice.

“Um,” Briar Rose says, and her voice is just as thin and creaking, albeit for different reasons, “please, madam, I’m a weary traveler and I badly need a place to stay the night…”

“No,” the strange woman says.

Briar Rose bends in closer, pressing a hand to the splintering door. “Please, madam, I’ll be happy to perform any task you need in exchange for a night of rest—”

“No.”

“Please!” Briar Rose says again. “I’ve traveled such a long way!”

“Don’t care,” the old woman says.

“But I—”

A gnarled hand skitters through the cracked opening and flicks her hard enough to make her snatch back her own hand. “Go away,” the old woman says, and promptly snaps the door shut.

Briar Rose stands there for a moment, utterly taken aback. She’s not so afraid anymore, despite the flashing skulls and strange smells and leering cloudy windows. Now she’s just exhausted. Turning her back to the wall, she leans back and slumps, loose strands of hair falling over her face. With a hand that feels ten times as heavy as it should, she plucks the last flower from her head and holds it in her hand. It’s a blue forget-me-not, wild and delicate and unwilted. She sighs, and crushes it whole in her hand.

She is so tired. Never in all her years of fetching and carrying and lifting has she ever worked so hard, or so desperately. More than anything, her heart is heavy. It feels as if every thought in her mind is a bucket full of water dragged up from the world’s deepest well, with her heart straining and panting under the weight.

From her closed fist, the smell of woodsmoke rises—it is cleaner and sweeter than the stuff that blows out of the chimney above—and the smell of winter, sharp crisp and clear. As clearly as if Merryweather were standing behind her, she hears, “Persistence, Rosie. There's no trophy for quitters.”

So Briar Rose takes a deep breath, deep enough that her ribs nearly creak. Then she turns around again and knocks harder.

“Excuse me madam,” she says, louder this time, “surely there’s something I can do for you? Surely there’s something you need? I don’t have much but I have strong arms and a good back, and a true love waiting for me two days ride ahead.”

The shutters rattle ominously, as if a storm were shaking them in their places, although the night is clear. The foundations of the house groan, and the lights flash yellow purple orange against the walls as if the skulls have turned to watch her with their blazing eyes.

“I’m not afraid!” Briar Rose says, breathing hard but meaning it. “I’m not afraid! Come out here and talk to me like a human being! Please!”

After a moment of rattling and howling, the house settles back into silence. In the doorway, more easy to see now that it’s creaked all the way open, looms a grizzled old woman, her coarse silver hair pulled back in an elaborate but knotted braid.

“Not afraid, eh?” she says, shrewd and unimpressed.

“No, madam,” Briar Rose says. “I’m too tired to be afraid.”

Beyond the old woman, the darkness is blurred with unearthly green light, the likes of which Briar Rose has seen only once in her life. “Young people,” she sighs, “they don’t scare like they used to. It’s all these passion plays, passing through every year, they think they've seen it all. Child, don’t you know I’m a witch? I’ll make you into a soup.”

“You’ll need a bigger pot than that one,” Briar Rose points out, considering the small cauldron hung over the glowing eldritch coals.

“You’re not as big as all that,” the witch says. But she seems vaguely amused. She steps back, nods towards the room behind her. “Come on in then, if you’re as tough as all that. As it happens I could use another pair of hands on the counter.”

As she says it, something goes skittering through the darkness, the right size to be a rat but the wrong shape. Briar Rose steps gingerly inside, a little pang of unease sipping through despite all her claims to the contrary. On the long table there are assorted cutting boards laid out, roots and leaves and strange hunks of flesh arrayed across them. The witch snatches up a wicked broad knife as she passes by, flipping it in her hands like a flashing baton. Skittering shapes disappear into the black corners of the room.

Briar Rose sets down her bag by the door. It makes a strange clunking sound as it hits the floor, and when Briar Rose flips it open to check, she finds the golden spindle glinting against the faint firelight. She sucks in a breath. What is it doing in her bag? She doesn't remember so much as touching it, not in the whole of her entire stay. What would Zhanna think when she found it missing? Unless she had left it there on purpose, but then, why wouldn’t she have said anything about it? She reaches for it now, uncertainly, fingers hesitating over the-

“What’re you doing over there?” the witch calls, crouched close to the table top as she tracks Briar Rose with her pale blue eyes.

Briar Rose snatches her hand back, in the middle of reaching for the glimmering tip. “Nothing,” she says, too quickly. She turns red under the witch’s unblinking scrutiny, certain that the old woman can read _thief_ burning across her forehead in hot red letters. But the witch only slides a thin boning knife across the table towards her, one black nail on the handle.

“Clean the fish,” she says. And indeed there is a fish among the array of ingredients, swollen head and glassy eyes and all. Briar Rose accepts the knife and begins the familiar task in preoccupied silence, circling the question of the spindle in her mind like a nervous vulture.

After a long while of unbroken work, the witch says to her, “Who cursed you, child? I know it wasn’t me. I’d remember something like that.”

Briar Rose pauses. “Someone my aunties used to know,” she says. “I mean, I know her too.”

“A witch?”

Briar Rose struggles with that for a moment. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

“Enchantress?” the witch suggests. “Fairy? Devil?”

“I don’t know,” Briar Rose says. The bone she’s trying to free pops out with too much force, skating across the table and down into the darkness. “She didn’t want to tell me.”

“You’re angry,” the witch observes.

“No—” Briar Rose pauses, “no, of course not. I’m not… I mean, what good would being angry do?”

The witch shrugs. “If you’re angry you’re angry,” she says.

“I shouldn’t be angry with her. I love her.”

“You love her,” the witch repeats. She sucks her cheek thoughtfully, making a hollow over her remarkably full set of teeth. “You love her, but she cursed you. I should think that’s plenty of reason to be angry.”

“It’s—” Briar Rose stops, frustrated, and hacks the fish head free with her skinny boning knife. “She didn’t know me when she cursed me. I don’t even know why she did it. I don’t know what she was thinking, she just showed up uninvited to my christening and tried to kill me!”

The witch works in silence for a moment, mincing fat roots into tiny chunks. At last, she says, “I know who you are, girl.”

Briar Rose turns to look at her. “You do?” she asks, in a voice too small for her mouth.

“I do.”

It occurs to Briar Rose for the first time that as a princess, there’s going to be some amount of fame attached to her, some amount of interest which strangers are bound to have cultivated over the years for the person she’s become. If she goes home _—when_ she goes home—people are going to know her. The prospect terrifies her.

“Oh,” she says.

“Listen,” the witch says, not entirely unkind, “something you ought to know about people like me. We are proud people. Vain, some of us. Downright nasty, on the wrong day. I wouldn’t take it too personally if I were you.”

“But it’s my life,” Briar Rose says, voice hopelessly small now. "What could be more personal than that?"

“That’s true,” the witch hums. “Up to you how you take it. I was just pointing out a little something about pride.”

The whole concept of pride is utterly alien to Briar Rose. She’s seen ragged children in the towns with parents too proud to beg for coins, and she’s never understood how something as intangible as pride could be more important than the lives of your loved ones. To hurt a stranger, the child of a stranger, just to appease some sense of wounded dignity—she’s been edging around the question since the beginning of this quest, but now she finds herself up to her elbows in it. All this, for pride?  What could possibly justify something so monstrous?

In a few days, if the curse holds true, she’ll be cold and quiet on a bed somewhere, still as satin and good as dead. Her heart thumps at the thought, her fingers shake until the knife tumbles out of her hand with a clang.

The witch, more gently than Briar Rose would have expected, takes the shaking hand and holds it in her own. She tilts her grey head. “That _is_ a deep curse,” she says. “It seems like someone tried to unmake it once before. When you cast an alteration on a spell like this, you know, it may change the shape of it, but it makes the thing stronger too. There’s no avoiding it now. It’ll have to run its course.”

“You couldn’t…” Briar Rose swallows, “you couldn’t try?”

The witch shakes her head. “No point. I don’t know how it was cast, so I wouldn’t know how to dig it out. The best I could do would be to change its shape again, but I’m not nearly as strong as either of the magicians who worked on you before me.”

Briar Rose sags, letting go of that one last piece of hope she hadn’t quite known she was still holding onto. “I spoke too soon before,” she says. “I am frightened, after all.”

“Understandable,” the witch says. She releases Briar Rose’s hand, returning to her work.

Together they make their way through the table of ingredients, and then they move on to the stirring and stoking, the mixing and the mashing. At the corners of sight there is more of that intermittent scuttling, strange pale shapes along the walls and floors. At last they run out of work to do, and Briar Rose sits on the floor beside the hearth, watching the pot bubble.

“Your bag,” the witch says, holding out a hand.

Hesitating, Briar Rose drags her bag across the floor and sets it in her lap, not sure what precisely is being asked of her. The witch wiggles her bony fingers. Briar Rose hands it over, reluctantly. Across the floor, the witch dumps the whole collection of items—the guilty spindle, the clothes, the traveling shawl, the scant remaining biscuits, and the wolf’s wishbone. She prods the collection with her beetle black nails until she comes to the bone, and picks it up. She holds it to the firelight, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, and she says, “This.”

Briar Rose only manages to stop herself for taking it back by a fragment of willpower. “I’m sorry?” she says.

“I’ll take this,” the witch says. She pockets it, deep in the grimy folds of her skirts.

“I—“ Briar Rose says, “I thought that helping you earlier—”

The witch ignores her, bustling back through the room only to return with a wineskin. It looks ancient and mottled with water stains, the bone lip of it cracked and blackened. She carries it to the bubbling pot and submerges it in the froth, unbothered by the heat boiling up to her bare elbows. No sooner has she corked it than she tosses it across the room to Briar Rose, who fumbles its slick skin into her lap.

“Drink that tomorrow,” the witch says. “Yanka's specialty. I know where Maleficent lives, and you’ll need all your strength to get there before your time runs out. Stop for nothing.”

“Thank you,” Briar Rose breathes.

The witch shrugs again. “There’s plenty to spare,” she says. “The young knight who asked for that potion won’t miss it. Take care that you don’t overexert yourself, though. It will take you one day and one night, but no further—you’ll pay yourself back that stolen time when it does wear off.”

The flask and her own fingers glitter against the dim light, tingling in a way that worries her a little bit. Magic, she thinks, real magic. But then, she’s always been living with magic, hasn’t she? It’s only that she didn’t know it before.

And she thinks, _I’m not at all the person that I thought I was_ , _am I?_


	6. Lady of Mercy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> De honte se doi on vengier,  
> l'honor son ami calgengier  
> (Every wrong must be avenged  
> the honor of one's friend must be upheld)  
> - _Silence_ , Marie de France

She and the beast ride through the day and late into the night, finding no houses or open spaces to lie down in at all. Briar Rose, who has improved in her ability to remain seated through even the most daring leaps, slumps over its neck and dozes until she begins to slide sideways, and then starts the whole process over again. Even the most distressing thoughts are barely strong enough to keep her mind occupied through the long night, which is as dark as the underworld and only a little less frightening. She’s lived her whole life in the wilderness, and until tonight she has never understood why townspeople look at the tree line with such fear. Now, in the unfamiliar jungle, she is beginning to figure it out.

In the pale light of dawn, she wakes to find with some surprise that she has been asleep at all. Their pace is much slower now, gentle enough that she has managed not to fall off in her sleep, and the steed immediately picks up its pace as soon as she shifts her weight on its back.

Another black unseasonable storm gathers over the course of the morning, and so by the time they arrive on a path again Briar Rose has no idea what time it might be. The sky has gone ominous and inscrutable above them. She is exhausted and slumped in her seat, barely able to look up from the ground. The path has been buried in slippery fallen leaves, little used and little touched. As the first drops of rain begin to shatter across the leaves overhead, she fumbles Yanka’s potion free from her heavy bag and uncorks the flask. It tastes sour and fishy and frightening, but she swallows it all with watering eyes and immediately begins to feel less as if she has been sanded down to bone marrow.

The long ride carries her another day and another night, and into the dawn of her sixteenth birthday. It spills over the sliver of empty space along the horizon, between the distant mountains below and the thick black clouds above. Never before has a carnation pink sunrise filled her with such dread, mouth dry and shoulders aching. The beast climbs the mountain that rises before it like a goat, leaping from one slick outcropping of rock to the next with its curved powerful haunches. With each leap Briar Rose’s heart sinks a little more. What will she do when she arrives at the castle keep? Already she can see the tops of towers shrouded in rain, just beyond the next summit.

What will she say?

Briar Rose dismounts with one eye fixed on its looming shape. The draw bridge is down. Wind tears at her skirts and her shawl, thick with the mist drifting down from the storm where it breaks across the peaks overhead.

“Be brave,” she tells herself. “Be kind. Be relentless.”

 

 

For days Maleficent has paced the floors of her castle keep, a cataclysm in her own vaulted hallways. In the corridor beyond her gardens she vaporizes her secretary of treasure, which puts even the most numbers-averse goblin to ill ease. The occasional scorching or whipping was good for moral, but total disintegration? Suppose she turned it on someone who wasn’t an accountant next?

Kilgrot, head of housekeeping in the castle, edges up against the door to the room Maleficent currently occupies. On the other side of her lies the entrance to the maintenance closet. He bounces from one foot to the other with his keys clutched tightly in his hands, uncertain whether he can make it across that expanse of floor without drawing his mistress’ attention. Maleficent has sunken into muttering sometime in the last days, her soft poisonous voice echoing in the stone chamber now before Kilgrot.

“Would that I had given her an unbreakable heart,” the echo hisses. When Kilgrot pokes his head around the corner for a bare second, he spies her long black nails, clawing rhythmically at the windowsill, dotted with running drops of rain. “Would that I had given her a heart of _stone_.”

Kilgrot is not dumb enough to be the goblin who asks his mistress “who”, but his curiosity is piqued all the same. No one knows where Maleficent went these past weeks. The last sixteen years have been a pretty unremarkable and uninteresting stretch of sulking and shouting, with this sudden unexplained disappearance arriving with no warning. Most of the housekeepers agreed that she’d most likely been wreaking vengeance on the babe at long last but this, to Kilgrot, doesn’t sound like talk of babes, or like vengeance at all. It sounds like fear, which is impossible, because Lady Maleficent is as fearless as she is ruthless and unrelenting. You can’t be a queen of goblins if you’re _afraid_ of things.

The muttering is making him more nervous than he was before, and he knows he’s got to make a move one way or the other now before he finds himself too twisted up with anxiety to do anything. He takes one step away from the wall and then all at once, in a barrage of clanking armor, a guard races by, knocking the keys from his shaking hands. Kilgrot falls to his knees, scrabbling after the keys as they slide away, and only pauses to realize he’s landed in the middle of the doorway when he looks up to see his mistress bearing down on him, robes flying. Kilgrot dives out of the way just in time to avoid being trampled.

 “She’s _where_?” Maleficent shrieks, at no one in particular, leaving the guard to race after. He dogs her heels, sweating and still clanking loudly enough to crack stone.

“My lady!” the guard shouts after her, “My lady!”

Kilgrot clutches his keys to his chest, and after a moment of growing silence, sighs and slides down into a heap against the wall. Maybe he’ll just take a break for now, and get that ladder later. Grungspit can last another hour or two on the roof, probably. A little lightning never killed anyone.

 

 

Here’s the thing. Maleficent all but flies down the stairwell like a wrathful ghost, nearly clears the first floor corridor in a single bound, but she stops short at the door to the reception hall. Her hand hovers above the door pull. While she stands there, frozen all at once, her dimwitted minion crashes into her heels and bounces back across the floor in a jumble of plate mail. What’s stopping her? It’s only a door. She’s opened this door a thousand times. She’s opened this door to receive dark lords from eldritch forests, enchantresses from distant kingdoms, she’s opened this door to face down the powers of hell and the fury of living darkness and not only survived but _consumed_ them, conquered them and owned them. Why stop now when all that lies beyond is an unarmed peasant girl?

“She’s in there, my lady,” her captain says, as he climbs laboriously up from the floor.

“I gathered as much, you cringing dolt,” Maleficent hisses. There’s no time for this—this—whatever it is. Maleficent steals one more glance back at her dithering subordinate and throws the doors open before she can lose her nerve.

The sight beyond is enough to strike the breath from her chest. The water that drips from the hem of Briar Rose’s dress might as well be molten gold—she catches the light, shatters the darkness, fills up the room without speaking a word. Her neck is craned back to gape at the frescoed ceiling, patches of purple and black scorched from the plaster by countless long ago shows of force. She looks exhausted. There are deep circles around her doe eyes and tracks of dust running to mud all down her figure, but Maleficent might as well have had a mountain dropped on her all the same. God’s wounds, she looks as lovely dressed in mud as she ever did sparkling in the sunshine.

Maleficent has to swallow more than once before she can manage to croak with any iota of grace, “Well, if it isn’t her majesty in the flesh.”

Briar Rose whirls. Her eyes widen, and for the precious smallness of a moment, her face splits into a smile so perfect that it threatens to crack Maleficent’s heart open to the root. Her arms lift, as if to reach, to embrace—

It is too much for Maleficent. She draws back, hunching into the billow of her robes as she stalks the perimeter of the room, staunchly avoiding eye contact.

“What an honor,” Maleficent says, “the young princess herself, on the very eve of her birthday. To what does my humble household owe the pleasure?”

There is silence for a moment, and then, “You are mistaken, my lady. It is my birthday fully now.”

That brings Maleficent up short. She turns, before she can think better of it, and finds herself pinned under the girl’s gaze. So soon? So soon? Surely there was an hour more, at least, an hour more before the time was upon them.

“So it is then,” Maleficent says. Her voice is hoarse. “What have you come here for, girl? Vengeance? Mercy?”

The girl’s heels leave an arc of slick on the stone as she steadies her stance. “Answers,” she says.

Maleficent laughs. “Answers? Answers, she says. You think to wrest answers from me, girl?”

“Answers are the least you owe me,” Briar Rose says, her chin firmly in the air.

“ _Owe_?” Maleficent says, “ _You_?”

“Me,” says Briar Rose.

Maleficent sweeps the last few feet to her throne and perches on it in a swell of fluttering sleeves and hems, green ball lightning above her head crackling from one ornate post to the other. “I owe you nothing, girl. I will visit my wrath on the sons of the father unto the seventh generation if I so choose! Speak with your stubborn fool of a sire if you wish to lay blame.”

Maleficent is unable to meet the girl’s eyes again, so instead she watches the slow, deliberate passage of her bare feet across the floor, a trail of muddy water like a train behind her.

“That’s it, then?” Briar Rose says. “That’s all?”

Maleficent says nothing.

“My lady,” the girl says, and in her mouth it rings like dire prophecy. “I’ve been told terrible things about you. About what you’ve done to me. I refuse to believe it until I’ve heard your side of the story. Please. My lady, please. Tell me it’s not what everyone says. Tell me there’s more to it, tell me—” she climbs the steps, laying her hands down hard over Maleficent’s, “—tell me you had to do it. Tell you didn’t mean it. Tell me anything, only tell me _something_.”

Maleficent feels fingers against her cheek as Briar Rose drags her back to once again meet that terrible gaze. Up close she’s even more bedraggled than she first appeared, her hair knotted and her skin feverishly pale. Even for a human, she is burning dangerously bright and fast.

“Shall I lie to you?” Maleficent snarls. “Shall I ease my wretched conscience with a lie to a doomed child?”

Briar Rose draws her fingers back. “So you do have a conscience.”

Maleficent makes an animal sound that even she barely recognizes. “What does it _matter?”_ she says. “My conscience is of no use to either of us.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Curse you?” Maleficent hacks up another laugh. “You already know that, you foolish thing. Your father the king neglected to invite me to your christening. Oh, I offered him a chance to save face, certainly, but it was quite pointless.”

“I don’t _understand_ ,” Briar Rose says. “All of this—my _life—_ for an invitation?”

“What else was I to do?” Maleficent snaps. “Let him slight me with impunity? A single mortal king? Certainly, and then what would be next, the lords of the underdark? The whole host of devils? Every fairy to the corners of the earth would laugh at the mere mention of my name—the meanest serfs would turn me away at the very door, goblins would pour from my household in unstoppable droves. You peasant, you child, you haven’t yet learned the first thing about honor or politics!”

“Politics!” Briar Rose cries, “Honor! You stand on the edge of my sleeping grave and you talk of politics! Who’s to blame if I know nothing of either?”

“I only acted as my station demanded of me,” Maleficent replies, breathing hard now. “You would understand that, if you had any understanding at all!”

“On second thought,” the girl says, bitterly, “maybe I should thank you for your mortal blow. I’d rather live sixteen years in happy ignorance than a hundred years believing that my pettiness is worth the life of another woman’s child.”

“What concern of mine is any _woman_?”

Briar Rose sways back, folding her arms across her middle. “Then I’ve asked the wrong question,” she says. “I should have asked you why you deigned to treated me so kindly, when you are yourself so pitiless and cold.”

Maleficent _feels_ cold. She feels hollowed out and ragged, like a gutted animal. Briar Rose is dimmed with the effort of her anger, flickering as unsteadily as a candle in a window. The hall echoes with their shared exhaustion, huger than it seemed just moments before. Maleficent presses one black nail to the softness of the girl’s breastbone. She watches cloth pull, mud and frayed cotton, under the perfect shining oval of her nail. “Would that I had given you a heart of stone,” she murmurs.

“How could you?” Briar Rose replies. “You don’t even know how to harden your own.”

“I thought I had done it. I thought I had done it such a long time ago. And then you. If I had known—” Maleficent swallows a hardness in her throat, “if I had known then what you would grow up to be…”

“Then what?” Briar Rose sighs, almost crumpling with the force of it. “Would you have done it differently at all?”

Maleficent reaches up and clasps the girl’s face, selfishly longing to feel the heat and the closeness of that life just one more time. “Do you hate me?” she asks. By god, she hopes so.

Briar Rose leans into her touch, eyes sinking closed. “No,” she says, at last. “No. At least you only hurt me. I can take it.”

Something wrenches in Maleficent’s heart. It’s almost unbearable. Her body spasms, but she just manages to keep her grasp firm, her hands now the only thing preventing Briar Rose from a full body collapse. “You shouldn’t have to,” she says.

“My lady,” Briar Rose mumbles. “I am—I am so tired—”

All at once, Maleficent is a livewire of fear and horrendous hope. She shakes the girl, surging up in her seat. “Stay awake!” she orders, clutching even tighter now. “We may have a chance. There are no spindles in my castle, Rose. There are no spindles here! If we can last out the sunset—we have only another few hours, we may yet outlast this wretched thing!”

Briar Rose squints at her, not quite present and not quite gone.

Maleficent presses a thumb into the bruised skin beneath the girl’s eye. “What tires you so?” she says, anxiety doubling and redoubling. “You shouldn’t fall into a sleep until _after_ pricking your finger.”

“Oh,” Briar Rose mumbles. With unsteady hands she reaches into her traveling bag and fumbles for something, amid the clink of metal on metal. “Yanka, the witch, gave me a potion—”

But the item Briar Rose pulls from her bag is neither a flask nor a vial. It is a glittering yellow spindle, its wicked metal tip dark with fresh blood.

“Oh,” she says. She looks down at the object in her hand, the tear in her pale finger, and then, as if the earth stood still beneath her, she says, “That is not at all what I was reaching for.”

And then she falls to the floor in a graceless heap, the golden spike of the spindle disappearing over the edge of the dais in perfect silence—

And Maleficent reaches, for the hand falling through the air, for the sleeve—

And thunder rattles the very bones of the castle keep.

 

 

The goblins have never heard a shriek like this one before. They come running in, tripping over each other and generally getting in their own way, as Maleficent cracks her own throat in animal rage. They bob and skitter as she gathers up the human girl’s motionless body into her arms, whisking her away deep into the castle, to the tower room that holds Maleficent’s own chambers. There are no beds here, because fairies don’t need to sleep and until recently it had never seemed a vice worth indulging. Instead, Maleficent throws the uncomfortable decorative pillows from the elegantly curved couch and lays Briar Rose there instead, on her side, blind to the drips and smears of muddy rain seeping into the foreign silk.

She paces her chambers. She had hoped to god that she wouldn’t have to watch this part of their shared passion play. God, she had hoped that the consequences might remain elsewhere, in another home, in another world. She has an image of the future now—this elegant, terrible room where the girl she loves will lie insensible until the very sun burns cold and the mountains collapse into the sea. Even if she returns the body now (to whom?) the specter of her will remain, a ghost as dumb and unmovable as the living girl who leaves it behind.

Maleficent digs her nails into her face, falling slumped into a corner. Mistress of darkness indeed. All powers of hell, _indeed_. What has she known of hell until today?

What a ghoulish tableau. Maleficent can’t bring herself to rise from the corner, nor to look away from the ruined couch. She hasn’t felt this small since the halls of her homeland, since the days of ruthless intrigue and endless schemes she was still too young to comprehend. She hasn’t felt so powerless since the distant dim times of her childhood, when every smiling face above her held inscrutable secrets behind their perfect pearly teeth. She learned fast how to play the game, she learned fast but not fast enough—no one ever learns fast enough, each merciless generation preying on the next—how to hide frailties, kill weakness—

Nightless, ageless eons she spent learning how to file her teeth sharp enough that no one would dare risk her bite. She played the game. She played the game until she ran out of board to play on, until her allies became her enemies too, and _still_ she survived. She made herself a queen. She commanded legions.

What was the point of learning it, she thinks. What was the point of all those years, against one human girl? Better that she had gone into the wilderness as a child and withered to an echo in the trees. All of it undone by one human girl. Better that she had never learned the meaning of honor than to keep it at such cost.

She _is_ certain now; if she but had the power she would undo all of it, all of it down to the day. She’d take the black mark on her pride. She’d bear the insult. Anything would be worth the price to have Briar Rose again.

She looks up. _Could_ it be undone? The past is an inaccessible country, but the present—could she unmake her own mistake? She climbs to her feet and lifts the girl’s hand from her side, turning over the palm and sluggishly bleeding finger. She’s never tried to recant a curse before. Can it be done? It’s her own magic after all, she ought to be able to find the place where it anchors itself. For a moment she stands over Briar Rose, paralyzed with indecision. Now that the solution presents itself, the same old fears are clamoring for her attention. If she undoes this now, at the eleventh hour, in this moment of weakness, there will be no recovery. Word will get out. Soft Maleficent, they will say, brung low by a mortal girl. Foolish Maleficent, pitiful Maleficent. Is she fit to be queen at all?

The thorns of her magic have grown deep into Briar Rose’s flesh. By the end of the day, they will be inseparable.

There is no one left but herself to decide. She is alone in the world with her legions and lieutenants, and her endless seas of enemies. The only person she would dare ask lies slumbering before her, dead to the world. She knows what the girl would say, though. Of course she knows. Hesitating now is the only true weakness.

Slowly, creaking with an age she can suddenly feel, Maleficent falls to her knees beside the couch and begins the arduous work of picking free each thorn, prick by burrowing prick.

 

 

Half an hour to sunset, Maleficent gathers Briar Rose up in her arms and brings them both to the kitchen of the cottage in the forest, grown so familiar now that these last seven days she often has seen it when she closes her eyes. The house is dark. It is quiet. Maleficent presses the girl’s head closer against her own neck and breathes hard, desperately searching for some sign of life in the cold empty house. Where have they all gone? Where are those blasted ninnies?

Maleficent steadies herself on a table for a moment, and then she does the thing she least wants in the world. In a flash of green light, she takes them both to the hall of King Stephen’s castle.

There is the immediate rattle of swords drawn, alarmed shouting. Maleficent hefts the girl in her arms, before she can slip free, and wipes sweat from her own forehead. She is a lady, she is not at all used to the kind of work that makes one sweat. She dislikes it immensely.

“Flora!” she shouts, “Fauna! Merryweather! Show your insipid faces this moment or so help me—”

It only takes them a moment. They come tumbling over each other in their haste, wands drawn, but they seem to lose momentum when they finally have her in their sights. She supposes that’s inevitable. Some time in the last hours she removed her robes to more easily work her difficult magic. It dimly dawns on her that she is standing unarmed in the hall of her most hated political enemy, holding his unconscious daughter, dressed in nothing but her smock and kirtle.

 “What—” Flora begins, completely cut off when Merryweather snarls over her, “What are _you_ doing here?”

“You,” Maleficent says, narrowing her eyes at Merryweather. “You cast this blasted countercurse. Lift it at once.”

Merryweather goes shaking red, but before she can explode, Fauna takes her firmly by the arm and stills her. “We will not allow you to take a human life,” Fauna says. “Not a single one.”

“Fine!” Maleficent says, “Help me save one instead!”

The three good fairies exchange bewildered looks. Maleficent snarls—there’s no time for this! She gathers Briar Rose closer and stalks across the floor, sinking to the ground at her foes’ feet. She lays the girl gently across the tile, brushing tangles of golden hair from her cheek.

“I’ve undone it all,” Maleficent says. “Every inch of it, right down to the end. But your damned spell, Merrywhether, it’s pinned the root down and I can’t work it free.”

“You’ve undone it?” Fauna whispers.

Flora is leaning down, examining the girl’s wrist between her petite hands. “It certainly does seem reduced,” she observes.

“I don’t buy it,” Merryweather says, “it’s got to be a trick! She’ll just recast it as soon as I take mine back.”

“Could be,” Flora agrees, absently.

“You fools,” Maleficent hisses, “we’re running out of _time!”_

“If she tries to recast it,” Fauna says, “we’ll stop her—together, surely….”

“We haven’t used magic but once for sixteen years,” Flora says. “And we’re barely a match even at our best.”

“It’s a trick,” Merryweather repeats, “she’ll do anything to see Rosie dead!”

“But we’ve run out of time. This is our last chance—”

“There’s a thousand princes out there! A hundred thousand of them! We haven’t lost yet—”

“ _Silence_!” Maleficent cries. Her voice rattles the rafters. All three fairies before her take an unconscious step back. “Look at us,” she says, lowering her head. “Wretched creatures, the lot of us. You love her, don’t you? How could you know her for sixteen years and not love her? If you love her, you already know what you’ll do. Any risk is worth the chance to see her again.”

For a moment none of them move. Then Flora takes a single, quiet step back. Fauna as well. At last it is just Maleficent and Merryweather alone, with the girl laid between them.

“It’s not fair,” Merryweather says. “You’re not supposed to know anything about affairs of the heart.”

“How I wish that were true,” Maleficent murmurs. She lifts Briar Rose’s palm, unfurling the fingertip where their two spells sprout from the flesh, black and blue and tangled, grown up together like intertwining trees. Dried blood flakes from the wound. “Will you help me?”

Merryweather sighs and rolls up her sleeves. “Obviously,” she says. “You were right. Any risk is worth the price.”

And together they begin to peel the knots of their curses free.

 

 

Briar Rose wakes up on the floor. This is pretty unsurprising, since the last thing she remembers is passing out. The strange part is that she’s awake at all. She blinks blearily up at the greenish blob that she assumes is Maleficent. She reaches up, patting at her face until she finds the familiar sharp curve of cheekbone. Ah, that’s her lady. Despite everything, the first thing she feels is a sense of perfect relief. Just like the moment that Maleficent opened the door to the reception hall, no matter what has happened before them and between them, just the sight of Maleficent—whatever she may look like—fills Briar Rose with love.

She swallows, but her mouth is terribly dry. “How much longer do we have?”

The slowly resolving shape of Maleficent frowns. “Until what?”

“The curse—” she tries to swallow again. “I can’t believe I wasted time sleeping when I’m about to sleep forever. How much longer until sunset?”

Maleficent squints at her. It’s incredibly endearing. “My girl, you’ve already pricked your finger on a spindle. Didn’t anyone explain the curse to you?”

Her finger is indeed a bit sore, and a little crusted with old blood to boot. “Oh,” Briar Rose says. “So that’s what they meant. I’m sorry, I had never seen a spindle before Zhanna.”

Maleficent claps a hand to her mouth as she begins to laugh, and then drops her head as the laughter turns into confused sobbing. Briar Rose tries to get her mind working again. So she’s already fulfilled the parameters of the curse. But she’s awake?

“Did you save me?” she asks.

Maleficent doesn’t look up. “Can you call it that when I damned you to start with?”

“But what about your honor? What about—” Briar Rose rubs her eye, “—politics?”

“To hell with them,” Maleficent mutters. “The rest won’t find me nearly so merciful when their turn comes.”

Briar Rose surges up and wraps her arms around Maleficent’s shoulders, pressing urgent kisses to her cheeks. “I knew you were good!” she says, with another barrage of kisses. “I knew it!”

Maleficent, holding still beneath the assault, accepts her kisses with exhausted embarrassment. Finally, Briar Rose turns her head enough to catch sight of her guardians hovering a few feet away. She pauses entirely, for the first time taking a moment to observe her real surroundings. This may be a castle, but it isn’t the castle she walked into. And her aunties look strange, in courtier finery, brandishing delicate little rods like fully fledged swords. What are they doing here?

“What’s… going on?” she asks.

Flora is the first to put away her rod. “This is your parents’ castle,” she says. “Merryweather and… Maleficent… have been working to undo your curse for the last half hour.”

As she cranes her stiff neck, she can indeed spot Merryweather on the floor a foot away, her round little face winded and drawn. She also has a rod trained on Maleficent.

“So I’m—” Briar Rose says, “—You broke the curse?”

“Not so much broke as uprooted,” Merryweather pants. “You won’t hear me complain about the thistles in the garden again, I can tell you that much.”

“You won’t have to,” Flora says. “There’s no reason for us to go back to the garden now…”

A sudden dismal melancholy falls over the three women, a palpable sadness with the weight of something often contemplated. Fauna shuffles her shoes.

“What?” says Briar Rose. “Why?”

“Did you think they lived there because it was their home?” Maleficent remarks. But she is still clutching Briar Rose tightly enough to strain her cotton shift.

“Sweetie,” Fauna says, “you’re a princess. Princesses don’t live in the forest.”

Oh. Briar Rose looks from her guardians to Maleficent, all of them united in a single moment of certainty above her head, and for the first time since waking, resentment starts to well inside of her. So they've taken her from her family, raised her on lies, and now she can’t even go home to visit after it’s all done?

She leans up and presses her forehead to Maleficent’s. “Thank you for saving me,” she says, “and thank you all for doing so much to protect me. But have _any_ of you thought beyond this moment?”

“What do you mean, Rosie?”

Unsteadily, Briar Rose climbs to her feet, one hand on Maleficent’s shoulder to steady herself. “I mean, while you were all feuding over my life, did anyone consider what would happen if I survived? I don’t know anything about politics or court life, I don’t even know how many kinds of forks there are. This week is the first time I’ve ever been anywhere farther than Mayfair village, let alone done it by myself! And maybe I don’t want to be a princess?”

“Royalty isn’t something you choose to be,” Maleficent says. She’s folded her hands in her lap to hide the tremors. “You simply are or you are not.”

“Pardon me,” replies Briar Rose, “but that doesn’t seem to have been the case for you.”

“Sweetie,” Merryweather says, “you’re young! Your parents will find you tutors, advisors. You’re only sixteen, after all.”

“But—!”

“I’ll teach you,” Maleficent says. The rest of them, all together, turn to stare down at her.

“ _You_?” Flora says.

“Consider it my—” Maleficent screws up her face in an expression of distinct pain, “—reparation, for the lost years.”

“No way!” Merryweather says. “We still don’t know the first thing about your motives! If you ask me, we still owe you a swift kick in th—”

Flora slaps her hand over her companion’s mouth. “Language,” she says. But she is looking shrewdly at the woman on the floor, her lips pursed tight. “What game _are_ you playing, Maleficent?”

Briar Rose watches her carefully. She hasn’t precisely forgiven Maleficent, but she loves her all the same. She knows what she would _like_ the answer to be.

“Would you _ladies_ ,” Maleficent says, “allow me a moment of privacy with the princess?”

There is a kerfuffle. “Absolutely not,” Merryweather says, just as Flora is saying, “No, I don’t think—”

“Please,” Briar Rose says.

Flora gives Fauna a worried look. She ducks in close and catches Briar Rose’s hands between her own. “Sweetheart,” she murmurs, “I know what you think this is, but you don’t know Maleficent like we do—”

“She could cast another spell!” Merryweather interrupts.

Flora scowls and sighs. “Yes,” she calls back, “thank you for contributing that.”

“Please,” Briar Rose says again. If there’s one thing she knows after sixteen years, it’s that Flora doesn’t listen well. She wills Flora to listen this one time. “I know you meant well, and I know you love me, but I don’t think you’ve ever trusted me in my life. I’m begging you, trust me now.”

Flora lets go. Sagging as if she’s expended dire effort, she gestures to the others. “Come on girls,” she says. “We’ll talk to the king for a moment. I’m sure he’d like to know what we’ve accomplished.”

The heavy wooden door falls shut behind them. Briar Rose turns at last to look at Maleficent on the floor, her proud chin pointed up at nothing in particular. The sleeves of her smock are rolled up above the elbow, showing the most skin Briar Rose has ever seen on her. She is _very_ green, like a poisonous dye, or a strange herb. Her face is unmistakable, though. Briar Rose clasps her hands behind her back and sidles closer. “So,” she says.

“So,” Maleficent replies, gaze fixed on the far wall.

“So.” Briar Rose ducks closer, bare feet sliding across the black and white tiles. “Was it difficult?”

Maleficent’s eye flicks over for the briefest second. “Have you ever tried to unpick the threads of a silk dress?”

“That would be a considerable waste of silk.”

Maleficent snorts. “Yes,” she says. “It was difficult.”

Briar Rose waits. She’s not going to put words in the mouth of the woman she yet loves. She’s experienced firsthand what happens when one rushes to fill in the spaces in a silence that hasn’t yet been explained.

“But,” Maleficent does say with a sigh, “nothing worth accomplishing is ever easy.”

Briar Rose smiles, although her lady can’t see it. Her lady? It’s strange to think that their rankings are reversed forever now. Strange and a little sad. She’d had these romantic visions of standing at Maleficent’s right hand, as a lady in waiting or even a knight, riding proudly under her dark banner. That dream is dust now in her mouth.

“I love you,” she says. “Still. If you were wondering.”

At that, Maleficent does turn. “I don’t see how you could,” she says, looking cross. “You’re not stupid.”

“And yet,” Briar Rose says, “you saved me?”

“It was your father, not you, who offended me. I’ve merely corrected an error of zeal.”

“And you offered to be my tutor?”           

“You offered me kindness.” The fairy shrugs irritably. “I have returned it.”

“Ah.” Briar Rose sits down next to her. Their skirts make round flowers on the checkered tiles, a bouquet of two. “My lady, do you know how you first seemed to me, the day that I carried you across the river?”

“Mortal, I presume.”

“Lonely,” Briar Rose corrects. “Proud and lonely, and lost. You were not _actually_ lost, were you?”

“Of course not.”

“But I think you were, in a way.” Briar Rose takes her hand, intertwining the fingers just so. “Maleficent, I have been lonely my entire life. I have been alone in a world that seemed huge and fearsome and almost incomprehensible to me. When I’m with you—when I’m with you, the hugeness of the world seems exciting, not scary. I never dreamed of leaving the mill before you arrived, and now I’ve, I’ve ridden across the length of the kingdom on _horseback._ You make me better. Stronger.”

“Anyone could do that for you,” Maleficent replies. “That boy you’re betrothed to, for instance.”

Briar Rose makes a face. “Don’t remind me of that please.” She shifts closer, leaning a shoulder against her lady. “Maleficent, I don’t know what true love is. I thought it was dreams and destiny and falling head over heels for a handsome stranger, but it seems like that’s only what it is when you love the _right_ handsome stranger. So I don’t know what it really is. All I know is, I’m alive and you’re alive, and I’d like to see you tomorrow.”

Maleficent looks at her. Maleficent has such yellow eyes, not quite like anything on earth. They would be frightening if only they didn’t look so uncertain, with her elegant narrow brows pulled together in something like pain.

“May I see you tomorrow?” Briar Rose asks.

Maleficent sighs, slumping against the girl’s side. Her sharp cheek bone presses into bicep. “Well,” she says, “you’ll have to, won’t you? I have a depressing amount to teach you about the identification of forks.”

Briar Rose laughs in relief, dipping her face in between Maleficent’s horns to lay a kiss in the smooth slats of her headdress. With the full imposing effort of her hood and horns, her underclothes seem especially desperate. It’s hard to imagine such a proud creature willingly going anywhere in such a mixed state of dress. She must have been frantic. Briar Rose isn’t above feeling a little vindicated by that, given that she had very nearly lost the better part of her life here. But mostly she just feels overcome with fondness.

“Is it awful that I’d really like to crawl into bed now?” she remarks.

“If I were you,” Maleficent mutters, “I’d never sleep again.”

Beyond the heavy wooden door, there is a sound like armored feet on stone. Sooner or later, and it’s seeming to be sooner, Briar Rose is going to have to meet her parents. It’s hard to tell if what she’s feeling is fear or heartache—loss or the anticipation of it? She wishes she could go home to her cottage and her mill and her familiar family, to the life that until a month ago seemed reliable and unchanging. She wishes she could go back to being a miller’s niece, dreaming of nothing so much as a handsome friend to fill the evening silence.

But nothing, she supposes, stays the same forever. A year ago she was fifteen. She can no more return to fifteen than she can to the life she lived then. And with one thing lost, she supposes, she’s at least gained Maleficent.

The door swings open. The figures who stand frozen there are unfamiliar—the beautiful sad woman clutching her hand to her mouth, the knobby older man with his hand paralyzed on the handle. If only Maleficent could take care of this for her too. But this is something, she understands implicitly, she has to do for herself.

Be relentless. Be kind. Be brave.

“Hello,” she says. She lifts a hand and gives them both a little wave. “I’m sorry if I caused you both any inconvenience.”


	7. The Lady of Shalott

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ever after

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> She knows not what the curse may be;  
> Therefore she weaveth steadily,  
> Therefore no other care hath she,  
> The Lady of Shalott.  
> -Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Blue,” Merryweather says, pushing the dress up as high as she can.

“ _Pink_ ,” Flora insists, throwing her own exact copy of the dress on top of Merryweather’s.

Briar Rose raises her hands in front of her to get a little more space before they both tumble forward on to her. “They’re both—very nice—”

“She likes the pink,” Flora sniffs, snatching her dress out of mid air as Merryweather dumps it off to the side.

Briar Rose takes a couple steps back as the argument picks up and leaves her mostly forgotten for the moment. Her chamber walls are bright with every color of silk she’s been able to find—purple and orange and the rare deadly green that she promised not to touch with her bare hands. That one is her favorite. She picked a room in one of the towers, just overlooking the archer’s walkway. It’ll be cold in the winter, with the wide window overlooking the battlements, but it’s worth it for the view. Half the time she’s walking around the castle, she feels like she’s navigating a catacomb. Stone walls don’t come naturally to her.

It’s been a month since her birthday. Tonight is the coronation, at which point she’ll very officially and finally take up the mantle of royal heir. On the greenwood desk of her vanity, one of the maidservants has laid out her coronet. The points of the golden thing strike her uncomfortably like the teeth of some fantastic serpent. She’s not going to touch that until she absolutely has to.

Casting one look back at her former guardians, who are completely embroiled in their argument now, she hooks a leg over the window sill and jumps down onto the battlement. This is the part she likes. Walking along the crenellation, high above the earth, she can see all the hidden little things that her royal parents don’t notice. The butcher feeding an apron full of leftovers to a dog. Two stable hands sharing a secret. A laundress laughing at a frivolous piece of lingerie. Talking to people is still difficult for her sometimes. This is a much easier way to understand them.

“You’re wasting time out here, highness,” Maleficent says.

Briar Rose glances over at the place where Maleficent has appeared. For her part, she looks stunning enough to halt an avalanche in its path. Briar Rose assumes that it’s at least half way her making a point about being Invited to the Event this time. It’s the first she’s seen of Maleficent in a lady’s dress since her disguise went up in flames more than a month ago.

“Oh, not you too,” she says. She slumps back against the stone, bits of mica catching at her loose hair. “Don’t call me that. I can’t take it from you too.”

“There’s no use denying the facts,” Maleficent replies, brushing dust from her black mantle.

Briar Rose feels like she’s been doing well up until this point, but the looming coronation and the endless tug war over the dress and the weeks of mistakes and missteps—the time she called a Duke just “sir” and almost started a civil war—and now Maleficent’s blessed and damned frankness? She cracks. She starts to cry, smudging white powder from her too-tanned-to-be-fashionable cheeks as she hastily wipes away the evidence.

Maleficent makes a startled noise. “Come now,” she says, “it can’t be as bad as all that.”

“I can’t remember what order I’m supposed to enter the throne room in,” Briar Rose sniffles, “and no matter which dress I pick someone is going to be mad at me, and I’m afraid I’ll trip in all these skirts, and there’s so many names I can’t possibly remember them all—”

Quietly, Maleficent glides over and takes her in her arms. She’s so tall. Briar Rose buries herself against the fairy’s bosom, ignoring the buttons that push into her cheek.

“No one will call me by my name,” Briar Rose whispers.

“Technically,” Maleficent points out, “Aurora _is_ your name.”

“And it’s—fine,” Briar Rose says, “it’s just—I don’t feel like that person. I don’t know who that person _is_.”

For a moment, Maleficent only holds her. Then she says, “Why all of this now?”

Now? Because this feels like her very last chance to get out of it all. Because once she puts on the crown, that’s the end of it. Because she doesn’t feel like she’s got the _right_ to put on the crown now, when there’s still so much that she hasn’t even begun to grasp. She’s afraid to say it out loud. So many people have put their hopes in her, her parents and her guardians and a whole kingdom full of people she’s never met, and even Maleficent, who’s spent countless hours over the last month teaching Briar Rose things that even a baby ought to know, if that baby were a princess. They’ve stayed up deep into the nights, working by candle light and foxfire, rehearsing curtseys and long titles, pouring over family trees, breaking down law books page by excruciating page. Sometimes when the morning comes, she finds Maleficent still perched in the window sill, dog-earing pages for future lessons. It’s so much _work_ , not just for one of them. They’ve both worked so hard, and they barely seem to have scratched the surface.

Maleficent brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. “In the forest,” she says, “you asked me something.”

Briar Rose makes an uncertain sound.

“You asked me to take you away with me,” Maleficent says. “You know now where I go when I leave you. If you still desire it… say the words, and I’ll take you away forever. You needn’t be anything but Briar Rose if you go with me.”

“I couldn’t,” the girl says. “I’d let everyone down.”

Maleficent shrugs. “I’ve been the villain before and I’ll be the villain yet. No one needs know you went willingly.”

Briar Rose laughs, a little wetly. In a way, the offer is tempting. Goblins don’t care what order their silverware goes in, if they bother to use it at all.

Maleficent feels her hesitation, and pulls back. She catches Briar Rose’s chin in her sharp fingers and says, “Then let me tell you what I’ve seen over the last month.”

In her open hand, black smoke congeals to form her staff. In the glowing crystal, an image forms of Briar Rose’s new bedroom, two figures seated on her opulent new bed.

That’s three weeks ago. The bruise on Briar Rose’s cheek is unmistakable—the memento of a clumsy attempt to scale the battlements while wearing ladies’ shoes. She’s telling Maleficent about the kitchen maid she’s befriended, and about the chain of command that runs from the chamberlain down to the scullery. The scene changes. The bruise is fading, and Briar Rose is unfurling her first attempt at epic tapestry, eagerly pointing out the section that she did, with the huge bristling boar. The scene changes. It’s later still, and Briar Rose is pacing her bedroom as Maleficent watches, explaining urgently the unfortunate business she’d come to discover in the household of the Marchioness. It had been a problem with a bastard child, a girl with dismally few prospects.

“Oh,” she says, looking up from the crystal, “I forgot to tell you with all the preparations going on. I found a lady who needed a handmaid for her daughter. I think she’ll be a good fit there.”

 Maleficent opens her hand again, and the staff dissolves back into coal smoke. “That’s precisely what I mean,” she says.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

Maleficent gestures vaguely to the courtyard below them, where dozens of people are going about their work in such a small space, effortlessly interlocking pieces of clockwork. Briar Rose feels her mood sink again. Everyone has something they’re good at, except her. She’s got the biggest job of all and she can’t even do it right. Why couldn’t the world just let her be a simple fuller?

“How many of them do you know by sight?”

Briar Rose pauses to count. She isn’t great with names, and a lot of the servants won’t actually _tell_ her their names, but she knows at least ten of them by their jobs, and she says so.

“As a monarch,” Maleficent says, “you’ll have to know who your allies and enemies are. You’ll have to know how each dynasty is related to the next, where the bindings of a treaty are starting to fray, who wants what and from whom. You’ll have to know politics. That is the part that people always think about when they think of monarchy.”

Briar Rose slumps over the ledge, folding her arms under her chin.

“What those same people _forget_ ,” Maleficent goes on, “what _I_ forget—is that you must also know how the kingdom beneath you works. Stephen—” she still says his name like it leaves a slimy feeling in her mouth, “—nearly incurred a revolt after he had all the spinning wheels in the kingdom burned. There was a shortage of cloth in the region for years afterward, countless spinsters who had to find other work or leave the county entirely, a sharp spike in the price of imports in every direction… All because one foolish man at the top made a selfish decision with very little real benefit.”

Briar Rose frowns. “He meant well.”

“As queen, you must look down as well as aside, my girl,” Maleficent says. “You have a strength that most royals never acquire. You see the parts of it that the rest of us… sometimes forget to see.”

“Oh.” Briar Rose wipes away the last of the damp powder on her cheeks. “Do you think that’s enough?”

“No one ever knows what will be enough,” Maleficent replies. “But I think you have the advantage.”

Below them, one of the washerwomen pushes her friend into the suds. There’s an absolute uproar as everyone in the courtyard immediately picks a side. Briar Rose winces.

“And of course,” Maleficent says, pointedly looking at nothing in particular, “you’ll have me as well.”

 

 

Briar Rose stands at the doorway, dumb with nerves as a gaggle of maidservants adjust everything from her veil to her chemise. She’d caught a look at her reflection as they bustled her out her door earlier, and she’s still dizzied by how she resembles her own mother now, in these clothes. Between the veil and the layers of velvet, her mother seems to be mostly clothing at any given time, with a little bit of person inside.

It’s been hard getting to know her parents after all this time. From the doorway she watches the king giving his speech, pointedly glaring at Maleficent—in the front row, blocking the view with her horns—every few sentences. He’s been so happy to meet his daughter, to ask her about her life, to introduce her to his friends, but he’s also… hard to talk to. He has such hard opinions about everything. It’s the reason why all those spinning wheels were destroyed, and also the reason why a baby girl was named heir to a kingdom in spite of the unspoken order of an entire dynasty. Although she’s beginning to understand that her inheritance is at least implied to hinge on her eventual marriage, which is… worrying.

And then there’s her mother, quietly seated on the throne, hands folded in her lap. She’s such a quiet woman. Briar Rose thinks often of the story Zhanna told her, trying to overlay the pattern of the living woman on the sketch of the fairy tale. It’s not hard to imagine her standing silently at the top of the stair as the sky blackens with the wings of vengeful birds, and that’s probably the thing that uneases Briar Rose most. She still hasn’t worked up the courage to ask about it. And Giovanna—her mother, her mother has been nothing but kind to her since she arrived.

The heralds lift their trumpets and begin a fanfare. Someone pushes against Briar Rose’s back. She stumbles forward, catches herself against the backmost pew and in the breath between then and now, she catches the eye of the child seated there. It’s a little boy. He looks like the child of a cook, his worn ordinary clothes mostly obscured by the fine old cloak cut down to his size. His eyes are bright, starstruck.

It occurs to her that someone will be that child’s future. Someone will _have_ to be. Wars and plagues will come, regardless of who stands at the helm, and that child will live or die by the choices of the ruler who stands there. This time, it’s going to be her. It’s a thought that should fill her with fear, but instead it fills her with… certainty.

If not her, then who? Maleficent is right. People at the top always forget the ones at the bottom.

Briar Rose rights herself. She pulls back her shoulders, straightening them under the weight of the long mantle, and starts forward down the carpet.

“Her royal highness,” the bishop announces, “the princess Aurora.”

She catches Maleficent’s eye, as she makes her way up the steps. She can be Aurora too. She’ll always be Briar Rose to the people who matter, but if she’s lucky she has a long life still ahead of her. There’s room in that life for both Aurora and Briar Rose.

 

 

The high ceilings of the reception hall that carried the single voice of a toast earlier become a thunder storm with a hundred human mouths chattering at once. Briar Rose winces at the sound of applause that breaks out when she enters the room. But she smiles too. From the moment the coronet touched her head, she’s felt a clear sense of peace that she hasn’t truly felt for more than a month. She feels as if she’s been walking outside of her body all this time, braced unprotected against the turbulent weather, and she’s only just now found her way back into the familiar warmth of herself. She shakes more hands than she can count, an endless rhythm of “your majesty” and “your highness”. She doesn’t say much. Lots of people are eager to extend invitations to visit their households in the countryside. She tries not to get too excited at the prospect of taking a break from Avaricon for somewhere a little less urban.

In the endless rush of well wishers, she at last finds herself facing a single person. The crowd pulls back imperceptibly, until it does seem as if they are alone even in the sea of bodies. He must be someone pretty important, not to be interrupted at all in this chaos.

He sticks out his hand. “Hey,” he says. “I’m Phillip.”

“Hello,” she says. He has a strong grip, which she belatedly tries to match. He looks delighted.

“That’s quite a handshake you have there,” he says. “I’m surprised you’ve got any energy left for it.”

“No one else has really been holding on very tight,” she says. “They might be afraid they’ll break me.”

“With calluses like yours I’m certain it would be the other way around.”

Briar Rose flexes her hands, noticing her own rough spots for the first time since she left the mill. Since she stopped working with lye on a regular basis, her dry skin has softened up quite a lot, but it’s true that she still carries the shape and texture of her baskets and her wood axe even now, silk dresses or no.

“Oh,” Phillips says, “no, I didn’t mean—there’s nothing wrong with them!”

“No, I know,” Briar Rose says. She looks up, and she smiles at him. “Actually, I’m glad you pointed them out. They remind me of home.”

Phillip looks relieved. “I took you for a swordsman at first,” he says, “but the thumb callus is wrong. Do you use a weapon?”

“Um,” she says. “An axe?”

“Fantastic!” Phillip says. “I’ve never been much good with a battle axe myself. We should—” and at this he leans in, a hand around his mouth, “—we should practice together some time.”

“Really?” Briar Rose says. For a moment she remembers her fantasy of dressing as a young man, carrying a sword, standing at Maleficent’s shoulder during a royal tournament. “But—I really shouldn’t exercise with a boy—”

Phillip shrugs, but the way he shrugs makes it seem as if he cares an awful lot about not caring. “I won’t say anything if you don’t,” he assures her. Then he pulls back and holds up his hands, palms open. “No funny stuff,” he says. “Promise.”

“Well…”

“I just thought it would be a good way for us to get to know each other,” he says. At her visible uncertainty, he goes on, “Since we’re betrothed and all.”

The name clicks all at once. So _this_ is the prince assigned to be her true love before she could even speak. She gives him a second, harder once-over. He _does_ seem nice. Kind of chagrinned too, as if the betrothal were something he hesitated to bring up.

“Are you…” she says, “excited about it?”

“Uh, sure. Sure. Are… you?”

“Sure,” she says. “Sure.”

They stand in silence for a long moment, examining their shoes.

“But do you think—” Phillip starts.

“What if we weren’t?”

“Right,” Phillip says, rushing to agree, “what if we weren’t?”

“I mean, suppose we wanted something else?”

“My father would go absolutely mad.”

“I don’t think my parents would be very happy either, to be honest.”

Phillip glances around the hall, and then in a low voice he says, “Listen, if you want to know the truth, I’m really not keen on this whole arranged marriage thing. It’s so old fashioned. I want to bring Tricassae into the fourteenth century, you know?”

“I’m… not very excited about being told who I ought to love, either,” Briar Rose confesses. “You seem like a very nice man, but…”

Phillip grins at her. “Say no more,” he tells her.

“Suppose,” says Briar Rose, “we just… weren’t to actually get married?”

“Ever?” Phillip frowns a bit. “It would make inheritance a problem.”

“No, no,” Briar Rose says, “but, just not until we’re older? I mean, once you’re king, you can marry anyone you want.”

“And we could stay betrothed in the mean time,” Phillip finishes. “But what about you? If you’re not married by the time your father dies, you’re going to be in for a difficult regime.”

Briar Rose sighs, rubbing her head where the coronet is digging into her scalp. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. I don’t know, I guess I’ll work it out eventually?”

Phillip considers that for a moment. “Tell you what,” he says. “If you aren’t married by the time you take over the kingdom, I’ll pledge you a third of my army. Let’s see a civil war start with those odds.”

He holds out his hand, and this time Briar Rose takes it without pause.

 

 

Maleficent spends the reception basking in the terrified and furious looks that she’s getting from every mortal in the room. She sips a glass of wine while making unbroken, unblinking eye contact with the fairy Merryweather. This might be the last time for a while that she’s going to be the most unquestionably feared woman in a room, so she might as well enjoy it.

When she spies the princess making her way through the crowd, looking even in the candle-smoke dimness of the hall as if the sun is shining on her alone, Maleficent’s black cold heart gives a hot little start. What a commotion it would start if Maleficent were simply to take the girl in her arms and kiss her soundly, in front of all these doddering fools. But there is the long game to consider, unfortunately. It was up to Maleficent to be the politician for both of them, now.

“Pretty thing,” she murmurs, as she bows to the girl.

Briar Rose turns red with delight, sinking into the curtsy she’s been practicing, perfectly pink in the ears. “I’m terrified that I’m going to rip the seams the first time I have to reach for something,” she admits.

“Princesses don’t reach for things,” Maleficent remarks, even as she thinks to herself that, had the princess been that sort of girl, things would have turned out very differently for them both. Worse, perhaps? Is she willing to concede that the world in which she lives today is indeed the best of all possible worlds?

Inside her there are a thousand maybe-futures, an endless constellation of moments that might be. Soon she’ll walk with Briar Rose through the dark quiet of her private gardens. Soon, they’ll visit distant mountains and clear hot seas all in the heft of a single evening. Another night on the battlements of the castle, watching the moon rise. Another night in the fields listening to her sing.

Is she changed? Perhaps she is changed. Or perhaps she is newly faceted, a sapphire cut to reflect old light anew. She has never felt so mortal. She has never felt so alive. It is as much weakness as strength, and yet—and yet…

She reaches out and pulls the girl close, enveloping them both in the black velvet of her cloak, and she says, “Once you told me you loved me. Do you still?”

“I do!”

No hesitation. Who is this creature, who knows so few trivial things and so very many powerful secrets? How to love, how to forgive? Maleficent fears she will live all her ageless endless life out and never truly understand. Maleficent spies the musicians, who have taken up residence near the east wall, and lifts a single finger in their direction. They freeze, lutes and pipes in hand, as she turns over her palm and looks away, at the girl in her arms.

Her voice is supernaturally crisp and full in the cacophony of human sounds as she calls, “Trouvères!”

They give her nervous nods. She takes in every strange-common detail of Briar Rose’s face—the blood beneath her skin, the faint sun-freckles over her collarbone, the whorl of her nose, the loose strands of hair beginning to grow dark with sweat.

“Play something for the princess,” she calls to them. “Play a love song.”

This must be the best of all possible worlds. Certainly, Maleficent can no longer imagine living in any other.

As the music tunes up—somewhat nervously—and then begins to spill free in earnest, Maleficent takes the girl’s hand in her own.

“May I have the first dance?” she asks.

Briar Rose pulls on her, instead of answering, and they go spinning into the steps of that familiar dance—the same now as it was that first night under the spotted sky, wet feet and unfamiliar skin. How many dances lie ahead of them still? There will never be enough, and that makes them each more precious.

“ _Donna di Scalotta,”_ the girl sings along, easy and familiar, “ _dare you leave your tower?”_

And Maleficent knows how it is that fairies come to love human beings.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun facts about this story:  
> Both these kingdoms are named after early French capital cities.  
> All the names in the quest chapter are different forms of the name "Ivan", male and female.  
> Maleficent's secret name is an old French personal name and a surname derived from the poem "la bell dame sans merci", because early folk fairy figures usually have names like "robin goodfellow" and "beautiful woman" seemed extremely appropriate.  
> The song Aurora sings in the second chapter is a real song sung at about that time, which the chapter is named for. There's a rendition on youtube if you're curious.  
> There is some cute art of them [in the future!](http://sauntervaguelydown.tumblr.com/post/165518117152/i-know-this-outfit-is-definitely-a-sixteenth)  
> The final song is more of a loose shout out to the 13th century Italian poem Tennyson cited in his own version of the Elaine of Astolat story.  
> The blue dress is vastly superior to the pink dress and Disney merchandise needs to Do Better. Is that a fact? it is now.  
> The last line of the story was the original last line of the first chapter, when the story was just a tumblr one-shot.
> 
> Cheers everyone, and thanks for all your support!


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